I’d like to see Sir Iq address the points made here regarding his defense of the jihadist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, or here about his own background and earlier statements. But so far all we are getting is that such things are “preposterous.”
“Top Muslim group denies extremist roots,” from Reuters, with thanks to Scaramouche:
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s leading Muslim lobby group, thrown into the spotlight by last month’s bombings in London, rejected an accusation on Sunday that its roots lay in extremist politics in Pakistan.
Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), said the allegation, made in the Observer newspaper, was “absolutely preposterous”.
“I can’t believe that anyone who knows anything about the MCB could take that statement seriously,” he told Reuters.
In a lengthy report on the MCB, the Observer alleged the council’s leadership and some of its 400 diverse affiliates had “links with conservative Islamist movements in the Moslem world” and “the extremist politics of Pakistan”.
It said the links were particularly strong with Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s leading mainstream Islamist party.
That party was founded by Syed Abul Ala Maududi, a respected Muslim scholar and commentator on the Qur’an, whom I quote in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He declared that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”