Earlier this year we ran a guest post on Aziz:
Mohammad Abdul Aziz is a Senior Muslim Advisor at DCLG. He is also a honary trustee of East London mosque (ELM) and the London Muslim Centre (LMC), as well as having been an advisor to the MCB. He was formerly an executive committee member of YMO, which is the youth wing of Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – an Islamist entryist group. After spending years in YMO propagating the teachings of the Islamist ideologueMaulana Mawdudi, Mohammad Aziz resigned to follow a stricter and more conservative form of Islam known as ‘Salafism’. As a student he attended UCL to study Law, grew a lengthy beard and would roll his trousers up over his ankles to conform to his new stricter interpretation of Islam. During his time as a Salafi he influenced a whole generation of young Bangladeshis in East London. He later came under the influence of a senior Jamaati Islami member Khurram Murad who eventually convinced him to once again join entryist Islamism. Mohammad Aziz then went onto represent the MCB at a number of events.
The Daily Telegraph has an article by Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohension which indicates quite how much Aziz is being paid for his faith related services:
Mr Aziz runs an organisation called Faithwise Ltd, the directors of which are himself and his wife. This summer, the Centre for Social Cohesion, of which I am the director, used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the Department for Communities and Local Government about its dealings with Mr Aziz over the previous year (though he had been its adviser since 2007).
What we turned up was extraordinary. Faithwise was retained to provide “strategic consultancy”. Mr Aziz’s organisation worked for 156 days for £113,394 – £725 a day, or at least £175,000 per annum, pro rata, rather more than the £142,500 the PM gets. Mr Aziz said his pay included VAT and operational costs.
While Mr Aziz has been contracted to central government, Faithwise has had significant “Prevent” funding from local government.
In recent years Camden council gave it £106,000 to set up a committee for a proposed new mosque. Just before Mr Aziz started working for the department, Faithwise and the Muslim Council of Britain won a contract from the Crown Prosecution Service to help its staff gain a detailed understanding of Muslim communities.
For Mr Aziz, then, the path of life seems to be strewn with £50 notes. But what did taxpayers get for that cash? It’s hard to be sure. One of our Freedom of Information requests asked what performance metrics were put in place by the department to see that Mr Aziz did his work properly.
The reply showed that it either didn’t understand the meaning of “performance metrics”, or was unwilling to reveal what they were.
This is quite remarkable. If we are to be subverted by Islamist entryists, we shouldn’t have to pay through the nose for the privilege.
