Assalamu Alaikum and welcome to the first annual Muslim Power List for the United Kingdom. We launch our inaugural edition in exciting and challenging times. Living in the midst of an unprecedented global financial crisis and confronted with rising unemployment, Britain faces the prospect of the closest and most unpredictable General Election in living memory, which is due to significantly increase the number of Muslim Members of Parliament. Meanwhile the Muslim community is under increasing attack from avaricious right-wing media and vote-grubbing amoral politicians. Ill-informed public figures, hungry for the filthy lucre available to those who can tar Muslims in the most outrageously negative brush strokes, demonise Islam and its adherents with complete impunity.
In order to counter this fraudulent portrayal, we have chosen to produce this list of the most influential Muslims in Britain. The Muslim Power List demonstrates the important contribution that Britain’s Muslim community makes to the social, financial and spiritual prosperity of the UK. This is achieved by highlighting the invaluable contribution to society being made by admirable Muslim role models who (we hope) will inspire the current generation of young British Muslims to appreciate the opportunities for success available to them.
Given this stated aim, some may be surprised by the handful of controversial figures that pepper the list in several categories. However, in collating this list we opened ourselves to public feedback and every person who appears on the following pages was nominated by the public. So if someone features on the list it is because you, the voting public, have put them there.
We placed just two restrictions on the eligibility of nominees. The first was that they must be orthodox Muslims, from the Sunni or Shia communities, who reside in the United Kingdom. Simply having a Muslim/Arabic name was not sufficient and only those who self-identify as being part of the orthodox Muslim community could be included. The second was that we would not recognise preachers of hate, as they do not represent mainstream Muslims and their influence within the community is miniscule – a fact the red-top tabloids wilfully ignore.
ANOTHER POWER LIST?
The concept of a list of powerful or influential British Muslims is not new, and one of the earliest attempts at publishing one was by The Guardian newspaper in 2002. Since then there have been numerous other projects which choose to recognise the Muslim community’s achievements and contributions in a similar format. So what makes our project different?
Firstly, our Muslim Power List is democratic. Aside from the two restrictions outlined above, the choice of who would appear on the list was down to the public. If the people don’t nominate you then you ain’t getting in! This is in stark contrast to many other Power Lists where inclusion is at the whim of a small and select group of “experts”, who often decide (quite impartially we’re sure!) that they themselves deserve to be on the list!?
The second major difference is that our Muslim Power List is a non-profit initiative, run entirely by a dedicated team of volunteers who make no personal gain from their involvement. We do not seek any sponsorship and would not accept any financial rewards if they were to be offered. We believe that doing so would compromise our impartiality, and we have seen with other Power Lists how the numerous sponsors often seem to find their way on to the list itself, which inevitably damages the credibility of the whole initiative.
CATEGORISATION
The Muslim Power List is not merely a chart of British Muslims ordered according to influence and/or wealth. Such an exercise would be pointless and have no benefit other than to massage, what are likely to be, already well-inflated egos. Instead we have ordered the list alphabetically within each category, and we will not be releasing the voting breakdown. We would prefer our audience focuses upon what the nominees have achieved for their country and community instead of how popular they are with the public.
We appreciate that the Muslim Power List cannot ever claim to be an objective rundown of the most influential British Muslims. Public opinion, by its very nature, is not objective. So we actively campaign for public nominations in the hope that we can at the very least present a true flavour of the success and involvement British Muslims enjoy in their communities and country. However, we also appreciate that any such list is inevitably going to omit many hardworking, successful, influential and commendable individuals. The list is not exhaustive. It is merely representative of Britain’s mainstream Muslim community.
We hope that you find the Muslim Power List interesting. We expect that you will disagree with the inclusion of certain individuals and the non-inclusion of others. And we would be delighted if you would contribute in the future by nominating candidates for next year’s Muslim Power List from January 2011 onwards.
GENERAL ELECTION 2010
The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that there are seven unfilled slots within the Politics category of the Muslim Power List 2010. This version of the list was released on the 1st of May 2010, just days before the UK General Election on the 6th of May. There is an expectation that several new Muslim Members of Parliament will be elected on that date, and it’s possible that some may even be chosen to oversee various government portfolios.
However, this could be subject to some delay in the event of a hung parliament – which according to the polls seems increasingly likely. As many of the nominations within the Politics category were for Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) we cannot finalise the list until after the General Election, the formation of a new government and the appointment of a new cabinet by the Prime Minister. Therefore, we expect to release a complete and finalised version of the Muslim Power List 2010 in June this year.
Many candidates for the list were nominated on the expectation that they would become elected lawmakers following the General Election, and it would be inappropriate for us to assume the result of any constituency poll given how more seats than ever before are considered to be “marginals”.
The astute amongst you will have noticed that we have included four PPCs within the Politics category, and done so prior to the election taking place. This is because these particular individuals have significant enough influence within the Muslim community and wider society that they would appear even if they were unsuccessful in their bids for Parliamentary seats. (As two of them are actually pitted against each other, we know that at least one of them definitely will be unsuccessful!)
COMMENTARY
The British Muslim community has such an abundance of accomplished, talented and outstanding role models that the greatest challenge we faced when compiling the Muslim Power List was keeping it to the promised length of 99 individuals. The number 99 was chosen as it has significance within Islamic teaching.
It probably comes as no surprise to any of our audience that, in a list of the most influential British Muslims, almost half the slots are populated by Muslims working in the fields of politics and media. It is our belief that these areas of life have a significantly higher impact on the public at large than any other category in the list. Whilst it could be argued that a successful sportsman (or woman) can provide a powerful role model, there is little argument that, all things being equal, a government Minister or investigative journalist will have more impact on people’s day-to-day lives.
In compiling the list we came across some interesting challenges. We did set ourselves various internal aspirations. For example, that at least a third of the list within each category should be female. To our great regret this aspiration has not been realised and there was even a category – Sport – where we did not receive any votes for female nominees whatsoever. This imbalance of gender representation was doubly surprising as the majority of our nominations (about 65%) appeared to come from women.
On further analysis, we came to the realisation that the issue wasn’t that women were not being nominated. Rather, the reason for the apparent shortage of women featured on the list was down to the votes for women being heavily skewed towards a handful of role models. Indeed, nearly ten percent of the total vote was dedicated to just four women: Yvonne Ridley, Salma Yaqoob, Mishal Husain and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed. So while many votes were cast for female nominees, they were generally concentrated towards a small number of “celebrities”. The result being that the list would not feature anything close to an equitable mix of the genders.
We were faced with some unpalatable choices. We could either include un-nominated women based on research we had independently conducted, but this went against our principle that all names on the list must have been submitted by a member of the public. Alternatively, we could choose an “affirmative action” strategy and lower the bar so that women were included who, given their contribution and achievements, would not have been included if they were men. This we considered to be an undesirable, and patronising, approach. Therefore, we compiled the list with identical criteria for all the candidates, women and men, who were nominated.
It is clear that women are not completely absent from the list. Far from it. In the Media section, which is the largest category within the list and represents nearly a third of the total, there are numerous women who have made great strides as communicators, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and role models. Similarly, we expect women to be equally as well represented in the Politics category after the General Election, as many of the PPCs we expect to include post-election are women selected for a “safe” – if there is such a thing anymore – seat.
We had also hoped that at least a fifth of the list would be dedicated to those who work to increase awareness of the true message of Islam. The Da’ees who are dedicated to ensuring that British society has an accurate and honest understanding of what it means to be a Muslim. We even reserved 20 places on the list for the Da’wah category. Whilst we did receive many nominations for this group, it was by far and away the least popular category in volume terms, and we had to reconsider the prominence we should give to this section.
On the face of it this presents us with a disheartening implication – that the proportion of Muslims dedicating their time to being Ambassadors for the deen in the UK is dwindling. What hope then could there be that non-Muslims would ever receive an honest and accurate message about Muslims and Islam? If more Muslims are involved in politics, the media, public service or sport than are dedicated to Da’wah then how are we ever to tackle the misconceptions and disinformation being peddled about us?
The reality is not this disheartening, however. Being an Ambassador for the Muslim community is not (and probably never was) about wearing Arabic/Punjabi attire and preaching about the minutiae of ablution or the evils of shirk and bid’ah. It is our strong belief that the most effective Ambassadors for the Muslim community are those who engage with mainstream society as professionals, communicators, community activists, artists, public servants and educators, and do so with humility, honesty, integrity and a concern for the well-being of their neighbours. That is a much more powerful form of Da’wah than countless sermons and vocal proselytising.
PRIVACY
The Muslim Power List would like to make it clear that, unlike some other Power List projects, we do not view the nominations process as a personal data collection exercise. Whilst we do ask those nominating to provide us with their name and email address, we do so merely to ensure that only genuine nominations are counted and to discourage “ballot stuffing”. We are aware of other Power List initiatives that collect personal data, under the pretext of nomination, with the intention of selling that data for profit. We find such practices abhorrent and will never act in such an unscrupulous way. The Muslim Power List is a non-profit initiative to its core.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to end by thanking my Research Team – Abdullah Rahim, Jowairya Khan, Moeen Khan and Misbah Chauhan – whose tireless efforts have made this project possible. The team and I would also like to thank the four thousand people who put forward candidates for inclusion on the list. Even if your nominee was not included, be assured that every vote was counted and reviewed and that we are very grateful for your input.
Tayyab Aziz
Director of Research
www.muslimpowerlist.com
The 30th of April 2010
