Muslims in MI5

Incredibly the new President of the MCB's interview on Radio 5 live was actually quite informative. The beginning was rather ho-hum as Dr Bari went over the usual talk over anger in the community and engaging with the youth. However the conversation was sparked by Henry Bonsu's question on whether Muslims should answer MI5 ads looking to recruit them.

Not surprisingly Dr Bari tried to evade the question. However Anita Anand sensed she was on to something and repeated it. This was followed by some more evasion and vague references to the community. Eventually on the third time of asking, Dr Bari managed to put together a somewhat coherent answer. He argued that people wouldn't respond to the police or MI5 if they had trust that they were being treated fairly. By the way, I'm not sure he knows what MI5 is and he didn't respond to the point that the ads were actually a way of reaching out to the community.

In any case this is the key question – would working for MI5 in the fight against terrorism be

a) morally neutral,

b) a noble pursuit or

c) an unholy collaboration?

I think that there is a difference between providing information to the police, working for the police and working for MI5. As Shazia, the very articulate caller to the programme said, unless she was pretty sure that she knew someone was a terrorist she wouldn't call the police as she wouldn't want an innocent person to get hurt.

On the other hand having a Muslim perspective in MI5 may well be quite useful. For instance if there is some intelligence going around that someone suspicious has been visiting a particular mosque, it might be helpful if there is a Muslim voice which says that he has been to that mosque for Friday prayers and the imam their is actually quite moderate; or that what looks suspicious behaviour is actually quite normal during Moharram. If one looks at it the other way, a Muslim may be able to identify some behaviour as suspicious which a non-Muslim might not recognise.

Of course their is definitely a risk that having some Muslims in the police or intelligence would be used to justify shoddy decisions on the grounds that, 'Muslims were privy to the intelligence and they agreed that a raid was justified'. That's not going to help anyone and hopefully if such a situation were to arise, then the people involved would resign as the barristers in the secret tribunals have.

All in all I think that having Muslims in British intelligence would be positive (provided their were no Ahmed Challabi's). Having said that, I think that Dr Bari encouraging it would probably have been counter-productive. In any case, I think this is an interesting debate which deserves to be debated further. 

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Listen to the full program by clicking here.

For a really interesting interview with Henry Bonsu click here.