Suliman Gani — the Man and His Detractors
This guilt-by-random-association game hit too close to home last week, and a new Hero Imam may have emerged in Britain — Imam Suliman Gani. I know the man and there could not be a more like-able Imam in Britain.
Who is Imam Suliman Gani?
Orthodox, articulate, humble and polite. Full of energy. Fearless and standing up for the oppressed. Open to debate and painstakingly tolerant of questions and gives detailed answers. In addition to his regular duties, he serves as hospital chaplain, and regularly escorts pilgrims to Mecca, and to Jerusalem. His obsession is moon-sighting and once we had an interesting discussion late into the night on the pros and cons of the Umm-ul-Qura calendar.
He is politically active, votes, engaged with both parties — most recently with the Tories who are now slandering him. He hails from South Africa and works extensively with inter-faith groups.
My Association with Imam Suliman Gani
In the interest of blunting this game, and supporting the Imams from around UK who have supported Imam Gani (and here), I am proud of my association with Suliman Gani.
I worked closely with him during the non-existent ‘Hate Leaflets’ of 2010 to successfully stand up for the truth. I unsuccessfully advocated for him with the Tooting Islamic Centre (TIC) management in 2013 when he was sidelined in a deal between the TIC and the Qadiani Ahmadiyya leader Rafiq Hayat. The deal was brokered by Sadiq Khan MP, now a candidate for the Mayor of London and the surprising cause of the orchestrated denouncing of Suliman Gani by David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in Parliament. If he is the political animal he is claimed to be, Sadiq Khan knows exactly how he has been stabbed in the back here.
Imam Gani was my first guest at my flat in Nottingham, where he stopped by with his family for lunch on his way to seeing his student daughter in a northern English city.
Dear Zac Goldsmith, I also shared a platform with Imam Gani a couple of times:
Imam Gani stayed at my house in Ontario and I took him sight-seeing to Niagara Falls and also to downtown Toronto.
And I saw him off on his way back to the United Kingdom:
The ‘Sins’ of Imam Suliman Gani according to Ahmadiyya
No group in the United Kingdom had any animosity with Imam Gani except the Ahmadiyya, and this continued after his ouster from his job engineered by them. Talk about ‘cult’ again!
His first sin? He tried to dissuade a Muslim halal meat shop owner to not sell his shop to a Qadiani Ahmadi as it would confuse Muslims who do not consider this particular group of Ahmadis as Muslim. It would be similar to opening a halal meat shop in a Jewish neighbourhood and labeling it ‘kosher’.
His other sin — he traveled to Canada to participate in a conference in Calgary that informed and educated Canadians about how then Prime Minister’s Harper’s working relationship with the Ahmadiyya was detrimental to Muslim interests. As you will see shortly, we presciently predicted this short-sighted anti-Muslim approach of the Ahmadiyya leaders will land their conservative partners in trouble. Lo and behold — it has landed the BBC and British PM in hot water when they slandered Imam Gani. And like-minded Canadian Conservative PM Harper lost the election while raising anti-Muslim issues in his campaign. By no coincidence, he was also advised on anti-Muslim themes by Cameron’s campaign advisor, Sir Lynton Crosby.
The BBC-Parliament Echo Chamber
Relatively obscure until now, how did Imam Gani get fingered out by Andrew Neil and David Cameron? The technique used on Imam Gani is what I call the ‘BBC-Parliament Echo Chamber’. This technique plants a little-noted story in a newspaper which then gets picked up by a member of Parliament who has received donations from the Ahmadiyya, and then the media has a feast on the the member’s statement delivered under parliamentary privilege. For this technique to succeed, the Ahmadiyya should be in the news at the time for some other reason so that the rest of the media, other than the BBC, also picks it up.
In 2010, the horrific terrorist attack on the Ahmadiyya places of worship in Lahore, Pakistan provided the trigger (this was one of the many attacks on places of worship during that time, includes shrines, mosques and churches). An innocuous parliamentary meeting of ‘Friends of the Ahmadiyya’ was set to discuss the matter. Two days before the meeting, the Wimbledon Guardian carried the story of the phantom ‘hate leaflets of 2010’. On cue, Siobhain McDonagh MP read out the entire story in Parliament and then the media storm ensued. In the end, nothing was found but Imam Suliman Gani eventually lost his job in the quest by Sadiq Khan MP to appease the Ahmadiyya leader Rafiq Hayat.
In 2016, the gruesome murder of the mentally-ill Ahmadiyya ‘prophet’ Asad Shah in Glasgow provided the background. The Cameron government, working on bad anti-extremism advice, was in the process of aligning against the Deobandi school and the dice were loaded when the murder happened — and unexpectedly the culprit was from the fanatic fringe of the Barelvi school that produced Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Governor Taseer of Punjab, Pakistan. The British government and BBC immediately went into overdrive to link the Deobandi-affiliated organisations because Radio 4 was about to present a two-part ‘Deobandi Special’. There may also be some Tory electoral interests in the Northern Midlands at play in this bait-and-switch. In any case, the British people were deliberately misled on the affiliation and motive of Asad Shah’s murderer. A reporter for a British daily told me that they were apprehensive of the ‘family of Asad Shah’ suing them if they even mentioned him as mentally ill, a medical fact acknowledged by the Ahmadiyya supreme leader. The family of the poor victim, after an initial statement, was silenced on Day 1 by the Ahmadiyya leaders, who have been carrying on with false attributions of motive and culprit ever since. No mention of ‘cult’ here.
Sadly, the Ahmadiyya leaders always overreach politically. They helped elect Bhutto in Pakistan in the early 1970s, overreached by attacking a train and the ensuing events saw them being declared non-Muslim for purposes of the Pakistan Constitution. They may have overreached again, this time in the UK.
To get back at Imam Gani for his ‘sins’, the Ahmadiyya planted an innocuous story with Max Hastings of the Daily Mail. Trap set for a parliamentarian to quote in Parliament. Who else but the Prime Minister himself to take the credit for derailing Sadiq Khan’s bid for Mayor of London? And he did. And it backfired spectacularly, thanks to all the Muslims on Twitter who knew Imam Ghani.
The House ‘Imam’ of David Cameron
Ever since David Cameron eased out Lady Sayeeda Warsi, his Muslim issues radar has been clouded by his resident ‘Imam’ — the unelected Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon who is now Home Office Minister for Countering Extremism and the former Communities Minister. He was also a prolific fund-raiser for Cameron’s party and a campaign manager. As an Ahmadi vice-president and clergy member, he has no link with the Muslim community of Britain and wouldn’t know anything about Imam Gani except for his two ‘sins’.
Was he the one to get his boss into trouble by trying to stitch up Suliman Gani? Who knows? It is, however, obvious that the person who did the dirty deed and enabled ‘parliamentary slander’ was influential and trusted and out of touch with the Muslim community. Whoever it was, he must have a marketing background to design and launch two almost-identical ‘BBC-Parliament’ echo chamber campaigns, six years apart.
In his TV show, click to see how he groups all Muslim scholars as ‘other’ and ‘mullahs’. And here he is pontificating about an ‘Islamic State’. Take that, Mr. Cameron!
What we know for certain is that Imam Gani as David won a moral victory against the Goliath of BBC, the Prime Minister, and their echo chamber.
