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The City Circle, a “moderate” Muslim group headed by Rabia Malik, sent out an email yesterday announcing that in July it will hold an event to celebrate the group’s 10 year anniversary. It says that:

The City Circle has been a unique experiment in creating an indigenous, independent and inclusive space for Muslim and non-Muslim communities to critically debate issues that concern them and to harness professionals’ skills back into helping local communities.

Independent? Really?

For the last two years, many of City Circle’s events have been quietly organised by and co-hosted with the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a Saudi-backed, US-based Islamist organisation that also has a branch in London. City Circle has not openly advertised this collaboration and the details of the eleven joint events held between the two organisations to date are only available on the website of the IIIT.

Why has the City Circle been so coy about its links with the IIIT? One reason might be that the IIIT’s US branch is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, is presently under federal grand jury investigation on suspicion of supporting terrorism.

An even closer look at the IIIT reveals a number of disturbing details:

• The IIIT’s US leaders are closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabi organisations. For example, its trustees include Ishaq Farhan who has recently been appointed secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front, the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, while one of its founders, Ahmad Totonji, was the first ever secretary-general of the World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY). The IIIT’s UK branch meanwhile translates, publishes and distributes books by Qaradawi and others Islamist writers.

• The IIIT has also been named as a “friend” of the Muslim Brotherhood’s US branch by an extremist member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was later convicted of terrorist charges in a US court.  In 1991, an internal document by the Muslim Brotherhood’s US branch, titled ‘An Explanatory Memorandum; On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America’, described the Brotherhood’s aim in the US as “Civilization-Jihadist Process”:

“The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The author included the IIIT in “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends” which he believed would be willing to work towards this. The author of this memo was Abdurahman Alamoudi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who would later be convicted on terrorism charges after admitting accepting nearly $1m from Libya and planning to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia

• Other senior leaders of the IIIT have close links to the genocidal, Muslim Brotherhood-backed dictatorship which has ruled Sudan from 1993 to the present day. Abubaker Al-Shingieti, IIIT’s Regional Director for Europe and North Africa, served as a spokesman for the Sudanese government between 1993-5 and was the presidency’s director of public affairs from 1995-8. During this period, the Sudanese government massacred thousands of Sudanese Christians in a brutal attempt to force them to live under Sharia law while the country also openly sheltered Osama bin Laden and leading jihadists from Egypt’s Islamic Jihad organisation. One can only assume that Al-Shingieti’s main job as a PR man in a dictatorship was to put a positive spin on genocide and fascism.

• The IIIT’s US branch has also donated at least £50,000 towards a number of Islamist front organisations run by Sami al-Arian, a US academic and Islamist activist who in 2006 pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to provide support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group. In addition to giving money to Arian’s front organisations, the IIIT also made quite clear that it supported his cause. A 1992 letter from the then-president of the IIIT, Taha Jaber Al-Alwani to Arian, stated that “the matter of the financial support was never the basis of our relationship, for our relation added to the brotherhood of faith and Islam is an ideological and cultural concordance with the same objective … We deem all of your institutions our own”.

• Prominent US analysts have even linked IIIT employees to al-Qaeda. Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Polict and former senior counter-terrorism official in the US government, has testified before the US congress that “Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT employee, personally provided bin Laden with the battery for the satellite phone [which] prosecutors at the New York trial of the East Africa Embassy bombers described as “the phone bin Laden and other will use to carry out their war against the United States”.” And, one might add, in al-Qaeda’s war against ordinary Muslims.

Rabia Malik, the head of City Circle, gives every appearance of being an ordinary, reasonable and tolerant person. Why then has she (and the other members of City Circle) allowed the City Circle to hold over ten joint events (the next is scheduled for 19 July) with the IIIT – an organisation which has such multiple ties to the most extreme and intolerant Islamist individuals and groups?

One can only assume either that she does not know very much about IIIT – or that she knows all about them and thinks that they are just fine for City Circle to do business with. But if she – and the other members of City Circle – were unaware of the IIIT’s true nature, then why has City Circle been so shy about revealing its links to the IIIT?

Rabia Malik is also highly regarded by the British government which has repeatedly wooed her organisation and has even paid for her to travel the world as part of their ‘Projecting British Muslims’ programme. One wonders if the British government is aware of the close co-operation between her City Circle and IIIT?

Have the British government’s counter-terrorism’s boffins done their due diligence on City Circle and its extremist connections? Did they decide that City Circle’s connections to IIIT were all fine and dandy? Or should we add this to the (ever lengthening) list of governmental screw-ups?

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YOSSARIAN ADDS: Yahya Birt has raised some objections to this article and we believe he will provide a response to it. We look forward to this and Spittoon will be glad to guest post it as and when he is able to do so.