News for British Muslims
5Pillars and the Far Right
By Josh White
British tabloids have made Muslims into bogeymen for the last 25 years. Every believer is a suspect. But there is pushback in community media.
Independent platform 5Pillars is a news service for British Muslims. It’s a conservative Sunni news organisation with a loyal, grassroots following.
The name of the news brand refers to the five pillars of the Islamic faith. 5Pillars’ mandate that it is out to “defend Islam and defend Muslims”.
Critics have predictably accused it of being an Islamist media outfit. This is partly because of its critical line on Israel and its conservative position on LGBT issues. Its editorial position sits outside the London consensus of British journalism.
The range of UK publications catering to minority communities is very narrow. However, with over 18% of the country’s population from Asian, Black and multiethnic backgrounds, according to the 2021 census, it is bound to expand.
A publication like 5Pillars was inevitable, just as The Voice exists for Black readers and Vashti Media exists for Jewish readers. It’s not the only Muslim news organisation operating in the UK today, but it has staked its own niche.
Despite not having corporate backing, 5Pillars is able to sustain itself as a news and politics publisher. The media relies on reader support for most of its funding.
It’s no coincidence that the 5Pillars project was built by journalists who tried to make it through classic routes into the mainstream. Editor-in-Chief Roshan Salih worked for the BBC, while deputy editor Dilly Hussain started at a Bedfordshire paper.
Hussain is the public face of 5Pillars, while Salih steers the ship in the background. The two oversee an editorial strategy typical of diasporic publications that mix local and global news stories that matter to immigrants and minorities.
For example, an average day’s top-of-the-fold features will include Alternative für Deutschland’s triumph in the German elections, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, and stories about The Daily Mail going after pro-Palestine campaigners.
If you have ever watched Middle Eastern media like Al Jazeera, this mix of stories will be instantly familiar. The difference is that 5Pillars is a community publication for British Muslims, whose circumstances differ greatly from those of Gulf Arabs.
Inevitable Controversy
One of the editorial highlights of 5Pillars is its Blood Brothers podcast.
Hussain hosts the program, conducting long-form interviews, sometimes lasting up to three hours.
The host takes a gentle yet probing approach and allows the guests to expatiate at great length on their politics. This is not the Grand Inquisitor-style interview perfected by Jeremy Paxman.
Blood Brothers will interview well-known figures on the Jewish left, such as American pundit Norman Finkelstein and South African activist Andrew Feinstein, as well as populist firebrands like George Galloway.
The controversy lies in why 5Pillars platformed Griffin. Many critics point to a worrying symmetry between the kind of conservative politics espoused by Hussain and elements of the far right.
During the interview, Hussain made it clear to Griffin that he wouldn’t mind Muslims leaving the West to “return” to the Islamic world, but only under certain conditions – namely, if there was a caliphate to return to.
It’s almost a repeat of the sentiment of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement. This might also explain why 5Pillars has run so much sympathetic content on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the rebel takeover Syria.
This series was bound to offend someone. Activists were among the first to take issue with 5Pillars platforming Griffin in a non-confrontational, even friendly interview.
Not only did Hussain get heat for the series on social media. 5Pillars clashed with its long-time regulator, Impress, over two interviews. This would ultimately lead to the platform breaking off its relationship with the watchdog.
These cases concerned an interview with Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett and another interview with former Britain First leader Jayda Fransen, an anti-Islam activist best known for being retweeted by Donald Trump.
Both of these cases are connected by one issue: Antisemitism.
During the interview, Collett, a neo-Nazi, made several claims about Jewish influence in world affairs. He referred to a “Judeo-American empire” and talked up Jewish influence in everything from the mainstream media to the porn industry.
Similarly, Fransen claimed Jews are behind Pornhub and suggested that they’re behind the “LGBT agenda” and the “abortion industry”.
Impress ruled that 5Pillars was ultimately far too soft on these views and didn’t push back enough against Collett and Fransen.
Critics claimed 5Pillars was attempting to forge a new relationship with the far right. However, 5Pillars maintains that it doesn’t endorse these far-right figures and argues that the interviews were conducted in the interest of freedom of speech.
The Impress rulings were the end of the line for 5Pillars after six years with the watchdog. Upon its exit, 5Pillars said the regulator is run by “what we perceive to be liberals whose values are not compatible with Islamic norms”.
This was a reference to the Impress ruling against 5Pillars for comments made about homosexuality in 2021. Hussain had described homosexuality as a “crime against God” in reference to the Quran.
The watchdog found that this remark was discriminatory. This finding, combined with the two rulings on the interviews, was the reason 5Pillars broke with the independent regulator.
The irony is that 5Pillars takes a very liberal position on free speech, especially by platforming and engaging with the far right. This is a jarring break with many years of work by anti-racist activists to contain groups like the BNP and now Patriotic Alternative.
Problems of Liberalism
Liberal societies are supposed to allow people to believe what they want, provided they aren’t harming anyone. Once it seeks to police the beliefs and values of individuals, it ceases to be liberal.
Somehow, the liberal framework of rights and freedoms is often mistaken for the content of those rights and freedoms. This is also complicated by the fact that Britain is a country with a Protestant state, where certain Christians can have their say.
Social and cultural conservatives often feel like a beleaguered minority in Britain today. Many white British right-wingers have far more in common with conservative Muslims (and even radical Islamists in some cases) than they want to admit.
Hussain himself was drawn into the public spat about sex education and LGBT teaching in schools. The change in curriculum in 2019 resulted in a wave of anti-sex education protests in Birmingham.
The Birmingham protests were first organised by Muslim campaigners and soon spread across the country. Many Muslims sympathised with the protests for reasons similar to those Christians have done historically.
In a Good Morning Britain interview, Hussain made a case for Muslims coexisting with LGBT persons. At the same time, he defended Muslim parents withdrawing their children from schools because of the curriculum they feel was imposed without their consent.
What began as Muslim protests in Birmingham became a conduit for transphobia across the country. The right-wing media, which has demonised Muslims for years, seized on the moment to advance its own anti-trans agenda.
The British right has long repeated many of the same talking points but doesn’t like it when Muslims make the same arguments. Widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians has made this more complicated. However, trans rights have become the new fault line.
Meanwhile, it’s the secular left that has long fought to defend the rights of British Muslims. The anti-LGBT right loves to mock queer protesters marching for Palestine while holding up Israel – without a hint of irony – as a safe haven for gays and lesbians.
This brings us to questions of Israel and Zionism. It’s no surprise that 5Pillars is scathingly critical, reflecting the sympathies of its Muslim audience with Palestinians.
The politics of 5Pillars are very much postcolonial and anti-imperialist. This is not the anti-imperialism of the secular Western left, but it is undeniably connected to the long history of national liberation struggles across the global south.
Palestine is a key part of this story for 5Pillars, but it’s not the only part. The struggle for freedom in Kashmir, the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan and the end of the US occupation of Afghanistan are all on the media’s map, as well.
All of this has meant right-wing critics accuse 5Pillars of being “Islamist”. This really just means “politically active Muslims”. The politics of 5Pillars might be better understood as pan-Islamic solidarity, but with important caveats.
Despite 5Pillars having an official policy of non-sectarianism, many Shi’a Muslims would look at the site and say it doesn’t speak for them. This is a matter of political and religious difference.
For example, 5Pillars ran an ‘explainer’ claiming the Alawite minority are real Muslims just after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham toppled the brutal Assad regime. This may be the view of most Sunni Muslims the world over, but the timing was suggestive.
Hussain is also on record dismissing Mehdi Hasan for his liberal Shi’a beliefs. The two men go back a decade and Hussain partly owes his start in mainstream journalism to Hasan.
He got his start in blogging at the Huffington Post because he wrote a critical response to a piece by Hasan. The two disagreed over how to characterise the rise of ISIS (don’t worry idiots, both opposed Islamic State). Nevertheless, Hasan helped Hussain get his piece published.
You can’t fully understand 5Pillars without grasping the context of the War on Terror and the waves of Islamophobia it unleashed in the United Kingdom. It’s been very tough to be a British Muslim, especially since 9/11.
Even the interviews with the far-right were Hussain’s attempt to de-mystify the men and women who demonised his community. Perhaps this endeavour revealed more about those individuals than 5Pillars.
The problem is the kind of nationalism that yearns to expel Muslims from Britain is on the rise. Somehow 5Pillars has gone from trying to counter Islamophobia to holding court with those who have propagated it.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.