Iqbal Mohamed stood for election on a platform of being a Muslim MP, who was elected because he stood as a Muslim MP, and who has consistently described himself as a Muslim MP – and yet complains that he is painted as being ‘sectarian’
November 17, 2025 13:57
They say you should always expect the unexpected, but I’ll be honest: I would never have expected one of the best definitions of chutzpah to come from one of the self-styled Independent Muslim MPs elected in July.
Last week Iqbal Mohamed (MP for Dewsbury and Batley) posted this on social media: “A sinister effort is underway to paint myself & the other independent Muslim MPs as sectarian and illegitimate. This will not stop us from fearlessly representing all our constituents, Britons & wider humanity with honesty, integrity & sincerity. We will continue to hold the gov't, individual ministers & other parties & members accountable.”
In the same post in which he describes himself as a Muslim MP, Mohamed complains that he is painted as being sectarian. Yet this is a man – along with his fellow MPs Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain and Shockat Adam – who stood for election on a platform of being a Muslim MP, who was elected because he stood as a Muslim MP, and who has consistently described himself as a Muslim MP, with the emphasis on being Muslim.
It’s not their being Muslim that makes them sectarian, of course. The Home Secretary is a Muslim and an MP, but she is not sectarian. Nor are others. They are MPs for non-sectarian parties who happen to be Muslim, just like the MPs who happen to be Sikhs or Hindus or Jews or…you get the point. The reverse of this is also true: there are other MPs, who are not Muslim, who are sectarian. It is rife in Northern Ireland politics, even when those elected do not use the label Catholic or Protestant in their party description.
To call Mohamed and his Independent Muslim MP colleagues sectarian is not an insult but a description. They chose their platform and their label. They chose to run on the basis that they are Muslims, and that their being Muslim is why Muslim voters should elect them. And it worked.
It worked so well, in fact, that come the next election there are a number of seats (all now held by Labour) in which other Independent Muslim candidates seem likely to win – which explains so much about the government’s attitude to Israel, given the fear among Labour MPs that they will lose their seats.
Despite this, what coverage there is of the views and activities of Mohamed, Khan, Hussain and Adam has tended to be narrowly focused on individual news stories in which they are involved, such as Ayoub Khan’s campaign against Maccabi Tel Aviv’s match at Aston Villa, rather than the bigger picture of what they are actually seeking to do as a political movement.
It's not as if it is difficult to find out. Just as Islamists and the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood are open about their aims – indeed, they are proselytising (even if their tactics are anything but open) – so the likes of Mohamed are not exactly secretive, either. They want to win support from their base, after all. So one simply has to listen to what they say. To listen, for instance, to a speech in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago to an all-Muslim audience at a Your Party event by the not-at-all-sectarian Iqbal Mohamed MP: “We must take over not just parts of Birmingham, but the whole of Birmingham, the whole of the West Midlands, the whole of the UK…We will not be taken for granted, and we will win." Just a sectarian Muslim MP declaring the aim of taking over the whole of the UK.
Why do we not listen to them? He and his colleagues are clear about their aims. They proclaim them loudly and regularly. That is what politicians do, after all. But just as they were dismissed as a fringe in the run-up to last year’s general election, and they then showed why they need to be taken very seriously, so once again they are being treated merely as an irritant to Labour rather than as anything more significant.
There is a parallel with how the government – both Conservative and Labour – and the authorities have consistently refused to grasp the reality of the Islamist threat. I’m not referring to terror, which is indeed taken seriously, but to their modus operandi in which charities, lawfare, academia and other institutions are used to further their agenda. Note, for example, how skilfully Islamists co-opt the language of the left in order to grow the so-called "Red-Green” alliance, and to have leftists acting as their useful idiots.
There is much mockery when groups such as “Queers for Palestine” proudly join the Free Palestine marches, because of the dichotomy between their embrace of the Palestinian cause and the fate – death – that would await them were they to wave a Queers for Palestine banner in Palestine.
But this points to a wider point about the inherent tensions in the Red-Green alliance – which are now opening up within Your Party and the broader "Free Palestine” movement. The split is being played out in the open between (male) religious conservative Islamists and the left, which has only ever been seen and used as a tool by Islamists.
As the idea – and reality – of a sectarian Muslim political force develops and spreads, there needs to be a greater focus on developments such as this, and a deeper understanding of where the movement is heading. To ignore it, or to treat it as no more than an annoying fringe, is to play into its hands.
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