A British Islamic charity has received a formal warning and had one of its trustees disqualified following an “inflammatory and divisive” sermon delivered in the days after the 7 October Hamas attacks.
The Charity Commission stated the sermon included the phrase: “the hour will not begin until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them until a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree.”
Attendees were also reportedly encouraged not to “busy yourselves with politics and voting.”
This case is one of more than 300 involving charities related to the Middle East conflict that the regulator, operating across England and Wales, has addressed in the past 18 months.
The latest case involved Nottingham Islam Information Point, a charity said to provide support to victims of Islamophobic attacks and address misconceptions about the religion of Islam.
But a sermon, given on October 13 2023 by trustee Harun Abdur Rashid Holmes “did not further the charity’s purposes, including to provide relief to those in need, and was not in the charity’s best interests”, therefore amounting to misconduct and/or mismanagement, the regulator said.
Mr Holmes, who is not a trained imam, was deemed not to have acted in accordance with his duties as a trustee and was disqualified in July last year.
He is prevented from holding any senior management position in a charity in England and Wales for three years – and noted by the commission to lack the good judgement expected of a trustee.
While the charities watchdog said it recognised some of the sermon’s content had come from a specific hadith – a narration of historical events ascribed to the prophet Mohammed – the appropriate context was not given and it therefore was “inflammatory and divisive”.
The regulator also said “no consideration” had been given to the timing of the sermon, coming six days after the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.
The commission said Mr Holmes had accepted that, with hindsight, the hadith was sensitive, and that he had not given sufficient context to it.
The commission’s assistant director of investigations and compliance, Stephen Roake, said: “In times of conflict, people expect charities to bring people together, not to stoke division. In this case, we found due consideration had not been given to the words and rhetoric used.
“The sermon was inflammatory and divisive, and we acted robustly and disqualified the trustee who gave the sermon. We also issued the charity with a formal warning.
“Following our intervention, the charity’s remaining trustees have taken positive steps to improve their governance. This includes the introduction of a more robust events policy. All charities that host events and speakers should take note of this case and ensure they have sufficient due diligence in place.”
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