Much has been written about the government’s strategy to fashion a politically quietist Muslim presence in the UK, mainly behind the smokescreen of “Countering Non-Violent Extremism”. It is an unashamed effort to reset the parameters of the Islamic faith by using public policy to reshape the way that Muslims think and behave.

What is less well known is how for at least the last decade, the Charity Commission has functioned as a foot soldier for the British state’s attempts to create this new, compliant breed of British Muslim. It has done this stealthily by bullying mosques and Muslim organisations into adopting the official orthodoxy by keeping silent on issues such as homosexuality and Israeli apartheid, to name just two.

We have received many reports from mosques and Muslim organisations that have felt the long arm of the regulator for alleged infractions of the rules governing their charity status. Many mosques operate under charitable status making them vulnerable to any abuse of power. Complaints are often based on the flimsiest of contexts but are used to justify wide-ranging and intrusive investigations, going well beyond the original complaint against the charity. In many cases, the complaints are part of a concerted campaign by Islamophobes or pro-Israel advocates who wish to silence Muslims.

It is not the business of the state to attempt to dictate to Muslims the content of their religion or to tell them what parts of it are permissible to be publicly expressed. Islam has a fourteen-century-old tradition of scholarship that has defined the religion for its adherents and it does not need outsiders, let alone an Islamophobic state, to interfere in that role. The British state does not do this for other religions and it should not be allowed to try and do it for Islam either.

The Charity Commission’s latest high-profile victim is the Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale, London. In May this year, the Commission imposed a non-Muslim interim manager to run the centre which serves as a mosque and a hub for religious activities. The move followed a concerted campaign of complaints by secularists, neoliberals and Zionists who see the Centre as a source of criticism of their views and activities.

In 2021 the Commission imposed an interim manager on the Birmingham-based Dar Ul Uloom Islamia Rizwia after a trustee shared a post on Facebook praising a recitation of the Quran by the Taliban. The same trustee has also criticised Israel for killing children and the power wielded by the Zionist lobby group, AIPAC, in the United States.

In 2019 three mosques in the north of England were investigated after they attracted complaints from the National Secular Society for “promoting extremism” after they posted links to articles articulating the condemnatory stance of Islam towards homosexuality and its disapproval of wives who refuse sex to their husbands. Even though the mosques removed the links the Charity Commission insisted on coming into the organisations and scrutinising their administrative structure, policies and accounts.

We cannot allow the Charity Commission to harass and attack our mosques with impunity in its quest to help engineer a state-compliant Muslim community. If we do not challenge its discriminatory and punitive behaviour we will effectively be leaving the way open for many more mosques to be targeted. We will find mosques self-censoring what they preach and teach and being ultra careful about which speakers to invite out of fear of being sanctioned. The room to criticise political and social injustices will be narrowed.