We have been documenting the rising influence of the violent extremist group, Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP), in the United Kingdom and in Europe. The work of Faith Matters on highlighting the pernicious and extremist basis of this group can be found here, here and here.

In a recent tweet made on the 2nd of December 2024, the flag of the extremist group was raised at a graduation ceremony in the London Metropolitan University.

The tweet can be found HERE.

What is clear is that the individual in the tweet hoisted the TLP flag in a London University, which should have alarmed officers at the institution. At the very least, safeguarding officers at the University should have identified the flag, which was waived at the graduation ceremony and hauled in the student and referred the matter to Prevent and the counter-extremism programme of the Government.

TLP is a violent Islamist extremist group that has been used as a motivating factor in the murder of people in the U.K and attempted murder of people in France, deemed to be heretics or against Islam. It has also targeted minority groups in Pakistan such as Christians and Ahmadis.

Faith Matters has been speaking on this issue since 2017, and has raised this matter repeatedly with senior civil servants in successive British Governments. Very little has been done on this and surely, now is the time to realise that such violent extremist groups could take hold in our institutions.

Now is the time to act for the safety of U.K nationals and in the defence of our democratic values. Failure to do so verges on the criminally negligent.

Read More: Inspired by blasphemy killer, new Pakistani party eyes 2018 vote

Iran is again taking tougher action against violations by women of strict Islamic dress codes, with the start on Saturday of a new drive on observance of the regulations in the Gulf state.

Controls were tightened nationwide and women disregarding the requirement to wear a headscarf in public remain guilty of a criminal offence, the Iranian news agency Tasnim reported on Telegram, citing a police commander.

Since the mass protests led by women in the autumn of 2022, Iran’s notorious morality police have been less strict, partly because they experienced more resistance from the population.

Instead, security agencies stepped up video surveillance of offences. For example, cars belonging to women who were repeatedly caught driving without a headscarf were impounded.

Authorities also tracked offences online, including photos of women without headscarves posted on Instagram. Shops and restaurants whose customers disregarded the dress code were ordered to close.

Since 2022, more and more Iranian women have been ignoring the dress code, while religious hardliners have tried to fight the growing defiance.

A new bill passed by parliament provides for draconian punishments but has not yet come into force.

In the coming weeks, a revised version is to be resubmitted to Iran’s so-called Guardian Council, an arch-conservative, 12-member supervisory body.

The mass protests were triggered by the death of the young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after her arrest by police because of an allegedly ill-fitting headscarf.

An expert United Nations commission concluded that physical violence after the arrest led to her death.

A British man was sentenced to life in prison on Friday over a plot to kill Prime Minister Theresa May by first detonating an explosive device to get into her Downing Street office and then using a knife or a gun to attack her.

Naa’imur Rahman, 21, of north London, planned to detonate an improvised explosive device at the heavily guarded gates of Downing Street and gain access to May’s office in the ensuing chaos and assassinate her, according to police.

He was convicted last month of preparing to commit acts of terrorism and at London’s Old Bailey court on Friday was given a life prison and will serve 30 years behind bars.

“Rahman’s target was the prime minister but he had no qualms about killing innocent bystanders in the process of reaching her,” said Dean Haydon, the UK’s Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism.

“At one point he told a covert counter terrorism officer that even if he could not reach the Prime Minister, he just wanted to strike fear into people.”

As he put the plot together, Rahman believed he was corresponding online with members of the Islamic State (IS) militant group. However, he was actually talking to undercover officers from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Britain’s MI5 domestic spy agency.

He was arrested last November shortly after unwittingly meeting an undercover police officer and collecting what he believed was a homemade bomb but was in fact a harmless replica.

After his conviction in July, police said Rahman had been in contact with an uncle who had travelled to Syria and joined IS and who had encouraged his nephew to carry out attacks in Britain.

Rahman had been planning to carry out the attack for two years but his resolve was hardened when he heard that his uncle had been killed in a drone attack.

Britain is on its second highest threat level with an attack considered highly likely. Last year, there were four deadly attacks and the head of MI5 said in May that a further 12 Islamist plots had been foiled since the first of these in March 2017.

Earlier this month, a man was charged with attempted murder after a car careered into people and a barrier at London’s parliament, with police saying the incident was being treated as an act of terrorism.

You can imagine our shock when we realised this evening that an Islamist extremist who lauded the brutal murder of Glasgow shopkeeper, Asad Shah, was on Twitter. Worse still, he had a ‘verified’ blue tick next to him, giving him some legitimacy in the eyes of member of the public.

The individual, Khalid Hussain Rizvi has been highlighted by us in Faith Matters many times. If you want to know what Rizvi is about, just take a look at this video which we compiled on just a few of his sayings to large congregations in Pakistan. In a bizarre twist, we even commented on Rizvi in 2016, and his comments were made to fawning congregations where he describes a telephone conversation with Tanveer Ahmed, the brutal murderer of Asad Shah. Rizvi has called Ahmed a ‘hero’ on many occasions and a ‘lion’ for the brutal stabbing to death of Asad Shah, a much loved shopkeeper in Glasgow.

In September 2017, Rizvi’s political party, Tehreek-e-Labaik, polled 7,000 votes in local municipal elections in a by-election in Lahore. The only campaigning point was the lionising of bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered Punjab Governor, Salman Taseer. The murder was based on Taseer’s defence of imprisoned Christian female, Asia Bibi. Tehreek-e-Labaik have also latched onto Tanveer Ahmed as another person whom they have lionised, thereby pushing the view that ‘blasphemers’ and those who protect minorities, are fair game for murder. Twitter are therefore providing a ‘verified’ Twitter platform to the spiritual leader of Tehreek-e-Labaik, Khalid Hussain Rizvi.

Rizvi, is in effect, an Islamist sympathiser who agrees with the violent extremism, particularly if it is against those protecting and advocating for minorities and Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan.

Given the facts, there is no justification that Twitter can provide for keeping Rizvi’s Twitter account open. 

France has expelled an imam of Islam’s strict Salafi branch for giving radical sermons seen as a threat, sending him to Algeria a day after the European Court of Human Rights gave a green light for the move, a source close to the case said on Friday.

French media said the imam, who has not been identified by authorities, was accused of making radical lectures against women, Jews and Shi’ite Muslims, allegations he denied. He was based at a mosque in the southern French city of Marseille.

The European Court of Human Rights had initially asked France to suspend the expulsion, after the imam’s lawyer had raised risks of torture, before saying on Thursday that additional information provided by French authorities had convinced it not to block the expulsion.

France, which has been targeted over the past three years by attacks claimed by Islamic State, announced in February steps including prison isolation zones and more stringent licensing rules for faith-based schools to combat what it calls a slow-burning threat from Islamist radicalisation.

The country has Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities. The latter is estimated to number upwards of five million.

An Elabe poll last month showed 80 percent backed the expulsion of radicalised foreigners, while more than half of its respondents said Macron was not doing enough to counter terrorism.

An asylum seeker and radicalised Islamist who killed one person and injured six others in a knife attack in a Hamburg supermarket in July has been sentenced to life in prison, a spokesman for a city court said on Thursday.

Hamburg residents threw chairs and other objects at the attacker – who had been known to authorities – helping police to detain him, but a 50-year-old man died of his injuries.

The asylum seeker could not be deported as he lacked identification documents and was psychologically unstable, Hamburg’s Interior Minister Andy Grote said after the attack.

Grote also said he had been registered in intelligence systems as an Islamist but not a violent one as there was no evidence to link him to an imminent attack.

Germany has been on high alert ever since December 2016, when a Tunisian failed asylum seeker killed 12 people by driving a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin.

The announcement of Sara Khan as the Head of the Commission for Countering Extremism, has already created a public debate on how extremism should be countered. Sadly, it has also led to the usual ‘trial’ by Twitter, with little regard to the fact that the Commissioner’s role was contested between applicants and a rigorous process of selection undertaken. It is as though, today, if groups do not like someone who ‘fits’ their world view, it is open season to malign, abuse and demean them with little regard to the damage it does to the agenda itself, in this case – countering extremism.

Furthermore, the British public need to know that they are safe in a world where far right and Islamist extremists and terrorists have murdered young children, men and women. Let us not forget the hundreds of British lives, (and the hundreds of thousands overseas), who have been lost because of terrorism.

People do not become terrorists overnight in a vacuum. Multiple factors influence them, including extremist rhetoric which is based on a ‘them and us’ set of beliefs. It is these set of beliefs which the Commission will seek to challenge, as well as other elements. Let us also be clear that there are groups operating here in the UK who foment group-think around ‘them and us’. They need to be challenged and challenged hard, if we are to develop inter-connected communities that see value in each other.

In light of this, countering extremism, its rhetoric and its violent manifestations are not just a ‘Muslim issue’. They are an issue for us all, at a time when there are multiple threats against communities and against our nation. We therefore welcome the start of this process and whether people agree or not with the appointment of Sara Khan, her track record on defending core social values of women’s rights, challenging extremism and pluralism speaks for itself. Let us also not forget the fact that it is not just a handful of groups who shout the loudest who speak for Muslims. Muslims can speak for themselves and we hope that they engage with Khan on her work going forward. The world of ‘community leaders’ is over and that is why this role is even more essential in reaching out beyond those who shout the loudest.

French counter-terrorism investigators questioned five people on Tuesday after police over the weekend found what appeared to be a ready-to-detonate bomb at an apartment building in one of Paris’s poshest neighbourhoods.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said one of those arrested was on an intelligence services list of “radicalised” persons – a list that includes the names of potential Islamist militants.

“We are still in a state of war,” Collomb, speaking after a Sunday attack in which a knifeman killed two women in Marseille, told France Inter radio.

Judicial sources said the explosive device included two gas canisters inside the building in the affluent 16th district of western Paris and two outside, some of them doused with petrol and wired to connect to a mobile phone.

It was unclear why the device was planted at the location where it was found as there was no obvious target living there, the judicial sources said.

More than 230 people have been killed in France in attacks by Islamist militants over the past three years. The Islamic State militant group, whose bases in Syria and Iraq are being bombed by French war planes, has urged followers to attack France.

Most of those killed died in attacks by Islamist gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris in 2015 and when a man drove a large truck into crowds in the Riviera resort of Nice in 2016.

Since then, there has been a string of attacks perpetrated by lone assailants, often targeting police or soldiers.

“The threat is changing form,” said Collomb.

A counter-terrorism investigation is also under way after the attack on Sunday, where a knifeman slit the throat of one of his victims and killed her cousin before being shot dead by soldiers at a train station in the southern port city.

A separate inquiry has been opened to establish why the man, who had been briefly detained by police the day before in the city of Lyon had been released.

France declared a state of emergency in late 2015 after the Paris attack by gunmen and suicide bombers, giving police special search and arrest powers to combat would-be terrorists.

New legislation was due to be put to a vote in parliament on Tuesday to make many of those emergency measures permanent.

Turkish police deployed in central Istanbul on Sunday to enforce a ban on the city’s annual gay and transgender pride march, blocking off a main street and dispersing groups of demonstrators who gathered nearby.

Police with riot shields and helmets sealed off entrances to Istiklal Street, where organisers had planned to hold the march before authorities announced the ban on Saturday, citing security concerns after threats from an ultra-nationalist group.

Small groups of people gathered in sidestreets waving rainbow flags, symbols of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pride. Police fired rubber bullets to disperse one group, witnesses said, and detained several people.

Footage posted on the internet also appeared to show them firing tear gas at one location.

Istanbul’s pride march attracted tens of thousands of people in the past, making it one of the biggest in the Muslim world. But in 2015 it was broken up by police and it was banned last year and again this year after threats from the ultra-nationalist Alperen Hearths group.

The Istanbul governor’s office said it decided to prevent the demonstration out of concern for the security of marchers, tourists and residents.

“The true reason for the reactions towards a march that took place in peace for 12 years is hate,” organisers said.

“Our security cannot be provided by imprisoning us behind walls, asking us to hide,” they added. “Our security will be provided by recognising us in the constitution, by securing justice, by equality and freedom.”

Istanbul has traditionally been seen as a relative safe haven by members of the gay community from elsewhere in the Middle East, including refugees from Syria and Iraq.

But although homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, unlike many other Muslim countries, homophobia remains widespread. Critics say President Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party have shown little interest in expanding rights for minorities, gays and women, and are intolerant of dissent.

Gunmen attacked security forces near St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s south Sinai on Tuesday, killing at least one police officer and injuring four others, the Health Ministry said, just a week after two deadly church bombings killed 45.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on a police checkpoint several hundred metres (yards) from the entrance to the monastery, one of the world’s most important Christian sites.

The attack comes just 10 days before Pope Francis is scheduled to visit Egypt and just over a week after two deadly suicide bombings on Christian churches, also claimed by Islamic State, plunged the country into mourning and marked one of the bloodiest days for the country’s Christian minority in decades.     

St. Catherine’s, founded in the 6th century and located at the foot of Mount Sinai, is one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world and a UNESCO world heritage site. It is part of the Eastern Orthodox church.

Egypt’s Christian minority, which makes up about 10 percent of the country’s 92 million people, has increasingly been targeted by Islamist militants, with three deadly church attacks in the span of four months.

In February, scores of Christian families and students fled North Sinai province after a spate of targeted killings.

A successful assault on St. Catherine’s would be the latest challenge to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has pledged to protect the religious minority as part of his campaign against extremism.

Egypt has for years been battling an Islamist insurgency in the rugged and thinly populated northern Sinai, which gained pace after the military overthrew President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 following mass protests against his rule.

Attacks in Egypt’s southern Sinai, a popular destination for  tourists dotted with Red Sea resorts, are by contrast rare.

Israel took the unusual step earlier this month of barring its citizens from crossing into the Sinai peninsula, saying the threat of attacks in the area inspired by Islamic State and other jihadi groups was high.