There’s an absolutely stonkingly good interview with Fiyaz Mughal, the former chairman and founder of the Tell Mama organisation and founder of the groups Muslims Against Antisemitism and Faith Matters, on the subject of Islam in Britain. I must admit that was eagerly awaiting this video when I first saw that it had taken place. I must also admit that I was extremely gratified when I actually got a chance to view it, as it was far far more informative than I might have expected.

It is no secret that I have had some run-ins with Mr Fiyaz Mughal. When he was in charge of Tell Mama I mocked this man as often as I could, mostly because Tell Mama was not, as I perceived it, the sort of organisation that respected things like freedom of speech. Tell Mama continually pushed the ‘Islamophobia’ line despite it being plainly obvious to many, including now to Mr Mughal, that the term ‘Islamophobia’ was a highly misused term. We’ve learned much over the last decade or more how the term ‘Islamophobia’ is used to shut up critics of Islam.

We all have the capacity to change, many of us also have the ability to look at our views in the light of experience or evidence and realise that we might have got something wrong about what we believed. I believe that Mr Mughal has changed a lot from when he was running an organisation that was clearly, in the opinion of many people, from civic nationalist activists to those concerned with the problem of Jew hatred, a danger to the concept and practice of freedom of speech. We could all see how the concept of ‘Islamophobia’ could be used to silence necessary and reasonable criticism of Islam. In this interview Mr Mughal counts free speech as one of those overarching British secular values which he believes have been, in his words, ‘sold out’ by the political Establishment. Now Mr Mughal supports freedom of speech since he can see the damage the whole concept of ‘Islamophobia’ has created and he has spoken in the House of Lords against the entire issue of criminalising ‘Islamophobia’. Fair play to the man for his change of views.

I found Mr Mughal’s interview both fascinating and informative. He covered an awful lot of ground in an interview lasting an hour and thirteen minutes. He spoke negatively about the massive demographic changes that have been imposed on Britain and how this has affected matters such as integration. He spoke about the generational differences in British Muslim communities, with the older generations mostly having gratitude for Britain and how they were taught, especially in the Colonies, all about Britain and its values. He appeared extremely worried about the fact that younger Muslims are more assertive in their religiosity and dress and how this is a mistake on their part. A mistake also, he said, was the inculcation of a ‘victimhood narrative’ in British Muslim communities and he blames this development and the rise of Jew hatred in Muslim communities in Britain on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. He’s scathing about the failures of the Establishment to understand the Muslim Brotherhood and deal with them before they ‘toxified’ Britain’s Islamic communities.

On the subject of Jew hatred Mr Mughal is unequivocal. He hates it with a passion and you can see this from his demeanour in the interview. He mourns the idea that Jewish life in Britain could be extinguished and blamed the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups for inculcating a “Muslims being victims of Jews” narrative into the British Muslim community. Mr Mughal spoke with what seemed to me a degree of anger at the Imams who promoted hatred of Jews and demanded that something be done about them.

On another matter, I very much welcome Mr Mughal’s comments on the Grooming Gang scandals. He was absolutely excoriating about them. He called them a ‘moral catastrophe’ and called for internal discussions within the Muslim community about this. Mr Mughal decried that elements of Muslim supremacy have been found in Grooming Gang cases and raged about the iniquity of Muslim men’s attitudes to vulnerable non-Muslim girls and young women. He called for an unstinting conversation about this ‘moral catastrophe’ in the Muslim community and said “We have to call out the problem of grooming in Muslim communities in order to put that moral injury right. “ He’s right. The conversation needs to be had and it needs to be had soon, as the Grooming Gang Scandals have been, as Mr Mughal said, along with the issues of importing extremists and the Lee Rigby murder, issues that have represented ‘significant tears in social cohesion’. I agree that we, as in we the majority population, deserve to see that this matter of the Grooming Gangs is taken seriously and debated seriously by Britain’s Muslims. The longer time period in which this conversation does not happen in the Muslim community and the more that Muslim leaders equivocate about these crimes or downplay the communal guilt for the Grooming Gangs, the more readily will beliefs that these crimes are acceptable to Muslims grow in the non-Muslim communities of Britain.

Surprisingly, for me at least, was hearing that Mr Mughal praised the work of Tory Nick Timothy MP over the issue of public Islamic prayer. Mr Mughal acknowledged that mass public Islamic prayer has been an assertiveness tactic of the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim Brotherhood-aligned groups and mentioned the restrictions on public mass prayer in Islamic nations. These nations understand the danger of the political Islam of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and act accordingly against them.

Mr Mughal spoke of the incident in Trafalgar Square where there was mass Islamic prayer, which was criticised by Mr Timothy. Whilst agreeing with Mr Timothy broadly on the problems of mass Islamic prayer, Mr Mughal took a more nuanced view. He believes that this particular incident was not planned but was spontaneous but he also called the prayer incident counterproductive because it reinforced the concept of Islamic supremacy and fear of Islam in the wider community. In effect he was saying that this prayer was a big mistake by those who took part as it’s made for more hostility than would have been the case if this had not had happened. Mr Mughal is very much of the opinion that faith should be kept for the home and the mosque. He’s right there. Mass public Islamic prayer is making the societal fractures much worse. It’s making people hate Muslims even more than they might have done before or make them fearful about what influence Islam has in how Britain is being governed.

Mr Mughal’s backstory, which he touched on, was fascinating. He grew up, as did many other Muslims and Hindus in British East Africa. His family, like so many others, was kicked out of where their families had lived for several generations by Black African leaders, after these places became independent of Britain. He spoke eloquently of the Britain-centred education that he got in the colonies and how he accepted that religion could be mocked when he laughed as everyone else did at a showing of ‘Life of Brian’ when he was a young man.

I know that Mr Mughal has been engaged in self-reflection and has repositioned himself over the last few years and this is welcome. I’m especially pleased, bearing in mind how the ‘mendacious grievance mongering taqiyya artists’ of Tell Mama used to behave with regard to Britons using freedom of speech to challenge Islam, that Mr Mughal can now see that freedom of speech is vital if we are to challenge some of the more troubling aspects of Islam. It is making me wonder whether Mr Mughal was himself responsible for some of Tell Mama’s excesses in their attacks on freedom of speech or whether it was his staff? Whether or not this is the case, Mr Mughal’s support for freedom of speech and the right to criticise religion is very welcome.

I must admit that due to my past disagreements with Mr Mughal, I expected to disagree with a significant portion of this interview but I did not. There was very little in what Mr Mughal said that I found that I could disagree with.

This is an almost Damascene level of viewpoint change from Mr Mughal from when I first encountered him over ten years ago. It’s a welcome one and I wish Mr Mughal all the best in his fight against Islamic extremism, an extremism that hates Mr Mughal and his type of open-minded and thoughtful view of Islam just as much as it threatens the rest of us.

This is a fascinating and informative interview that is well worth the time taken to view it. It tells much of one man’s journey and experiences and what that journey and experiences have taught him. I’ve been a massive critic of Mr Mughal and his organisations in the past but this interview has made me think much more positively about him and his current views.

Here’s the interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=342MzVykFrQ