On 23 January, the Palestinian Forum in Britain is hosting an online event to mark “Arab Communities Day” 2021. Among the invited speakers is the Jordanian academic and Muslim Brotherhood figure, Dr. Ahmad Nawful (also spelt Nawfal, Noufal, Nofal).[1]
Nawful, a professor of Islamic law at Jordan University, was banned by the Home Secretary (Theresa May) from entering the UK in 2011. He has a long record of extremist comments.
In 2008, Nawful endorsed a fatwa issued by Sheikh Faysal Mawlawi, then vice president of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (established and headed by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi), which explained why it would be legitimate to kill Israeli civilians.
In 2016, Nawful appeared on a Jordanian TV channel and stated how the Jews had simultaneously fabricated the scale of the Holocaust (citing the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, he said that only 600,000 had died – but that the Jews had added a ‘0’); and had been responsible for it – claiming that “most of Hitler’s ministers who perpetrated the Holocaust were Jews”.
More recently, Nawful told his TV show that when Palestine was liberated, all synagogues would be “uprooted” and the Jews thrown “into the sea”. And he has also
claimed that Covid-19 is a punishment sent down by God upon those who refused to submit to him.
According to the Jordanian journalist Azzam Tamimi, who has long been close to the Muslim Brotherhood, Nawful waspreviously a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “fedayeen” forces, who engaged in guerrilla war against Israel prior to September 1970. Since then he has been described by one academic as a Salafi-leaning, Muslim Brotherhood “hard-liner”.
Other speakers invited to participate in the PFB event include:
- Dr. Hafiz al-Karmi
- Dr. Ahmed al-Shiba
- Kifah Zariqi
- Hinadi Helwani
- Hiyya al-Shati
- Abd al-Latif Fadlallah
- Yahya Hawwa
Hafez al-Karmi is the chair of the Palestinian Forum in Britain and also the Director of the Mayfair Islamic Centre in London. Al-Karmi is also a former director of the Muslim Welfare House, an organisation identified by academics as part of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned ‘Islamic movement’ in the UK. In 2005, when the Finsbury Park Mosque (also known as the North London Central Mosque) was handed over to new management, drawn from the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), Hafez al-Karmi was named as one of the new trustees. The MAB is another organisation that is widely viewed as part of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned network in the UK, and was named as such by the Government’s 2015 Review of the Muslim Brotherhood. For its part, the MAB has denied having links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Palestinian Forum in Britain describes itself as an “independent institution serving the Palestinian community in Britain and promoting the Palestinian issue”. It has previously been listed as an affiliate of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) – it is unclear whether or not it remains so as the MCB no longer publishes the list of its affiliates and the PFB does not publicly identify its affiliations.
[1] Nawful’s role in the Brotherhood is referred to in Thomas Hegghammer’s recent, forensic biography of Abdullah Azzam.