The British Muslim Trust, anti-Muslim hate monitoring, and the risk of narrative capture
The British Muslim Trust (BMT) — led by the Aziz Foundation and the Randeree Charitable Trust — has been entrusted with recording and monitoring anti-Muslim hate incidents. This is a role with significant potential to influence the ongoing policy debate around Islamophobia.
The Home Office has awarded BMT a contract of £2.6 million over three years to create the official mechanism for collecting and publishing data on anti-Muslim hate incidents across the UK, including those that fall outside police reporting systems. The money comes from a new taxpayer funded “Combating Hate Against Muslims fund”. Interestingly, the word “Islamophobia” is absent from official descriptions of the new monitoring system and its fund. This is significant given that ministers are still deliberating over the adoption of a formal definition of Islamophobia.
Although BMT will not define hate crime in law, the question is whether it will have the power to define what counts as “anti-Muslim hatred” for the purposes of public reporting, media framing, and policy discussions? It seems it will be able to determine the categories, count the incidents, and shape the datasets presented to the Government and the public.
Of particular interest within this arrangement is the Aziz Foundation, established in 2015 by property magnate Asif Aziz, who came to public attention for controversially planning to convert part of London’s Piccadilly Trocadero, which he has owned for some years, into a mosque. The Foundation is a curious choice for a partner. It has explicitly stated that its “values do not align with those of the Prevent policy, which actively harms Muslims”. The Foundation also believes that “higher education (HE) is … an incubator of institutional Islamophobia” and states that “eradicating Islamophobia [is] central to its social mission”. To this end, it has funded over £9 million in postgraduate scholarships, awarding around 660 master’s scholarships and 71 paid internships — exclusively for British Muslims.
While this scholarship programme appears philanthropic, its strategic focus is activism-driven. These scholarships support Muslims to study at universities such as UCL, Sussex, Goldsmiths, Liverpool and Sheffield in disciplines such as journalism, law, policy, and media — sectors that shape public perception and legislative agendas. The Foundation does not merely fund equitable education; it cultivates influence. Its choice of partnerships provide a clue as to what kind of influence it seeks to spread within Britain’s institutional fabric — one that appears to emphasise Muslim victimhood.
Since 2019, the Aziz Foundation has provided £2 million to projects focused on “journalism and combatting Islamophobia”, naming only two recipients: the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) — launched that same year by the Muslim Council of Britain — and the Islamophobia Response Unit (IRU), an independent charity but originally established by the Islamist activist group MEND, which was named last year by then Communities Secretary Michael Gove as one of three Muslim groups under investigation for extremism.
The Aziz Foundation has also supported two of its scholars, including Maira Khan, to take up paid internships at CfMM. Khan reportedly played “an integral role” in CfMM’s first report on Palestine, which took the view that the media should not refer to Hamas as a “militant” or an “Islamist” group, since they were elected in Gaza in 2006. Another of its scholars worked directly with the APPG on British Muslims, the parliamentary group responsible for proposing the contentious 2019 working definition of Islamophobia.
The Aziz Foundation’s partner organisation, CfMM, exemplifies the risks of ceding narrative control over important matters of security and integration to monitoring bodies professing expertise in religious literacy and objective methods.
As I and my co-author show in a recent report for Policy Exchange, CfMM presents itself as a media watchdog combating anti-Muslim bias, but promotes a restrictive, ideological view of acceptable language relating to Islam. It has tried to dissuade use of the terms “Islamist” and “Islamism”, even referring to “so-called ‘Islamist’ terror” and “so-called ‘Islamist’ extremism”. In doing so, it has sought to dissuade reporting on the ideological drivers of the greatest terrorist threat to Britain, responsible for over 90 per cent of terrorism-related deaths since 1999 and, appropriately, the largest proportion of MI5’s caseload.
CfMM has also referred to “so-called ‘grooming gangs’”, categorically rejecting any association between the perpetrators — predominantly Pakistani Muslim men — and their religion, whilst criticising reporting on this topic as based on “shoddy” underpinnings. Such denials of the ethno-religious dimension of group-based child sexual exploitation, and the over-representation of Pakistani Muslim perpetrators, have of course now been shown by Dame Louise Casey’s review to be completely false. CfMM’s more general claims about widespread Islamophobia in the media are undermined by the number of successful complaints it has made to IPSO — just one in seven years.
Consistent with the Aziz Foundation’s belief in “institutional Islamophobia” in higher education, it has hosted talks by Sofia Akel from London Metropolitan University’s Centre for Equity and Inclusion. She authored a report, Institutionalised: The rise of Islamophobia in Higher Education, that polled Muslim students and teachers at London Met — using a sample size that would not enable any meaningful extrapolations — to explore aspects of “institutional Islamophobia” in higher education. Reflecting more about the state of academic rigour at British universities than institutional bias against Muslims, Akel’s report assumed precisely what it should have sought to demonstrate. It also favourably cited not only the Aziz Foundation’s work, but that of Asim Qureshi, the research director of the Islamist group CAGE, who once described Jihadi John – Mohammed Emwazi — as a “beautiful man”.
The Aziz Foundation’s attitude towards Prevent, its assumption of “institutional Islamophobia” in Britain, and its partnership with CfMM all raise serious concerns about the BMT’s ability to classify, record, and monitor anti-Muslim hatred in a reliable, objective manner. If its reporting adopts similar assumptions as CfMM — equating criticism of Islamist groups or of religiously motivated violence with bias or bigotry — it risks becoming a tool of narrative control rather than objective data collection. Without methodological transparency and independent oversight, the BMT’s system for recording anti-Muslim hate risks becoming a vehicle for silencing scrutiny rather than exposing prejudice.
This concern is sharpened by the appointment of Akeela Ahmed to head the BMT’s new monitoring unit. She also sits on the Government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia Definition Working Group — the body advising the Government on an Islamophobia definition. But she has a particular, partisan perspective on the matter. She believes in the “structural nature of Islamophobia” — which allegedly concerns “every aspect of a British Muslim person’s life”, such as education, employment and representation in the Criminal Justice System.
This raises the potential issue of conflict of interest. In her role overseeing the Government’s anti-Muslim hate monitoring unit, she would be expected to operate in line with the Government’s definition — assuming there will be one — of anti-Muslim hate or Islamopobia, not necessarily what she believes it should be.
In oral evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee in April 2024, Ahmed was asked how the Government should address the rise of anti-blasphemy activism in the wake of incidents like the Batley affair. Instead of condemning the intimidation of teachers or defending free speech, she shifted blame to a “lack of investment in community cohesion” and the spread of online misinformation.
This poses questions over her commitment to free speech where it concerns Islam or Islamism — especially if criticism or satire is treated as evidence of hate rather than a legitimate exercise of expression. Given her view on the need to record hate incidents that are not recorded as crimes when reported — and her belief in the necessity of a legal definition of Islamophobia — these concerns are genuine.
The stakes are high. No civilised society should tolerate genuine anti-Muslim hatred — which is already addressed by current legislation. But outsourcing the monitoring of hate to a consortium with activist ties risks creating a chilling effect on media reporting, academic inquiry, and political scrutiny — particularly when it comes to sensitive but factual matters such as the religious motivations behind acts of terrorism, or the religious background of grooming gang offenders from vastly over-represented groups. If BMT follows the template of CfMM — which has previously categorised accurate, public-interest reporting on Islamist extremism as “Islamophobic” or “misleading” — then the risk is the distortion of truth. In such a framework, public debate may be stifled in defence of religious or ideological sensitivities. That does not protect Muslims; it corrodes this country’s commitment to free speech, evidence-based journalism, and democratic accountability.
BMT must be held to rigorous standards. The Government should require it to publish a transparent methodology focused first and foremost on criminal hate crimes against Muslims, not subjective or ideological interpretations of offence.
If incidents outside the criminal threshold must be recorded, these must be clearly distinguished from hate-crimes. To gain a complete picture of anti-Muslim hate, the system must make some other categorical distinctions: It must capture sectarian hatred within Muslim communities, such as Sunni hostility toward Shia or anti-Ahmadi bigotry, where people are targeted for a specific Muslim identity. It must also monitor anti-blasphemy hatred and intimidation targeting ex-Muslims/apostates, and secular or reformist Muslims. These individuals face real risks — from ostracism and harassment to threats of violence — merely for exercising freedom of conscience and expression. These are again cases of hatred based on specific Muslim identities.
Care must be taken to ensure that the BMT does not, even unintentionally, exclude certain individuals or groups from protection by adopting narrow or doctrinal definitions of Muslim identity. A truly inclusive approach must recognise the diversity of Muslim identity, including all self-described Muslims and those who dissent from, reform, or leave the faith.
Absent these safeguards, this new body … could blur the line between prejudice and dissent, between genuine hate crime and protected criticism of ideas
BMT’s monitoring unit should acknowledge as a foundational principle that ideological or religious criticism is not anti-Muslim hatred. Robust critique of Islamic doctrines, jurisprudence, political Islam, or religious leadership—no matter how controversial or even offensive — must remain fully protected in a free society. Monitoring systems must never blur this line. The Government ought to ensure this principle is baked into any definition of Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hatred that it formally adopts.
As a further safeguard, all data published by the new monitoring unit should be independently verified, with input from legal experts, genuine civil liberties advocates, and non-activist academics — not only advocacy organisations. There should be a formal, independent review of the monitoring unit after one year. Absent these safeguards, this new body will not monitor hate — it will manufacture a narrative. It could blur the line between prejudice and dissent, between genuine hate crime and protected criticism of ideas. And in doing so, it risks doing more damage to Britain’s democratic fabric than the bigotry it claims to expose.
