MEND STATEMENT: THE WITHDRAWAL OF GOVERNMENT FUNDING FOR TELL MAMA IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR GOVERNMENT TO WORK WITH GRASSROOTS MUSLIM GROUPS

The government has announced that it will stop all funding to Tell Mama, an organisation set up to record incidents of Islamophobia in the UK. The news was met with alarm by some activists as it comes amidst a record rise in Islamophobia throughout the country.

It is impossible to combat Islamophobia without access to reliable data on the phenomenon. Therefore we need organisations who work to diligently collect this.

However, Tell Mama and its founder, Fiyaz Mughal, have always been deeply problematic. The organisation often avoided the widely accepted term “Islamophobia” in its work, thus refusing to accept that Islamophobia is much more than a narrow definition of anti-Muslim hatred. As such it did little to tackle the structural or institutional Islamophobia emanating from media, political parties and right-wing institutions. It was previously led by Richard Benson, a former head of the pro-Israel Community Security Trust. Such issues left it discredited among the Muslim community.

The organisation has also long been dogged by accusations that it underreports incidents of Islamophobia and plays down the seriousness of this form of hatred in the UK. For example, its founder, Fiyaz Mughal, has blamed Muslims for having a “victimisation narrative” and has tried to smear organisations like MEND who work to tackle Islamophobia as “Islamist peddlers of victimhood.” We note that for many years the Muslim community have been the largest religious group targeted for religious hate crime according to the Home Office’s own statistics hence this minimisation of the suffering of these victims has been particularly offensive to the Muslim community.

It made very little sense that Mr Mughal was willing to spread ideas that fed into the same Islamophobic tropes that his organisation was ostensibly established to challenge. With this organisation now defunded, government has the opportunity to engage with groups that genuinely represent the Muslim community.Therefore, MEND calls upon the government to reallocate its funding to legitimately grassroots civil society bodies who work to record cases of Islamophobia and provide support to victims. We encourage the government to proactively seek out and establish ties with such organisations as soon as possible to help our community stand up to hatred and bigotry.