The Centre for Islamic Enlightening has dropped hosting an exhibition on those Muslims who saved Jews in Albania. The reason given was that “it has no connection to any foreign government and stays well clear of anything political or perceived to be political”. The real reason was that it was pressured to do so through tweets which suggested hosting the exhibition would legitimise Israel's Yad Vashem, the leading Holocaust memorial institute globally.

As Roshan Salih, the 5Pillars editor said on Twitter, “No to normalisation. Boycott Israel and Israeli institutions." This led to Iranian and Arabic websites highlighting the exhibition in negative terms and led to what Centre staff said were security risks for them. In other words, they felt threatened.

The Centre, which is based in the Golders Green Hippodrome, met opposition in November 2017 from a small number of hardline members of Jewish communities, who objected to it being located within this historic site. Numerous faith leaders and the then President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jonathan Arkush, came to its defence. This led to strong ties between the Centre and local and national Jewish institutions and meant that the link was a source of pride for both British Jewish and Muslim communities. 

Fast forward to last week and attempts by the Barnet Multi-Faith Forum to get the Centre to host an exhibition by Yad Vashem around stories of Albanian Muslims who saved Jews in the Holocaust. This exhibition somewhat mirrored the exhibition that Faith Matters, the organisation that I founded, put together in 2010 on the back of the Righteous Muslims booklet that Es Rosen and I put together. We wanted to find and highlight lost stories of Muslims who saved Jews.

The polticisation around Israel and Palestine choked any voices that wanted to document these stories, as though they would legitimise Israel. This perverse logic meant many of these oral histories were lost, helped the claim, pushed by, that Muslims were part of SS Gestapo Units in Bosnia - who were involved in rounding up and exterminating Jews - dominate. This is true and cannot be washed over. It highlights how the SS used Islam and antisemitism to attract some who were Muslims from the Balkan regions. Serbian nationalists used this piece of history to whip up hatred against Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1995.

Yet, the vast majority of Muslims fought against Hitler and the courageous stories of Muslims saving Jews are now a forgotten history. As a Muslim, a part of my heritage has disappeared, hyper-politicised into a silence that will stay for eternity.

You would think that hosting an exhibition highlighting some of these stories would be a chance for Muslims to reclaim their history at a time when so many wrongly align Islam and Muslims with just terrorism and extremism. But a decade after launching the Righteous Muslims booklet, only a handful of the three milion British Muslims even know of any stories of Muslims who saved Jews in the Holocaust. I put this down to those who believe they are speaking for the Palestinians by denying Muslims their own history and heritage.

I have met Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem who want to hear the stories of Muslims who saved Jews in the Holocaust. Granted there are Palestinians who will revere and laud the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who asked Hitler to help an Arab revolt against the British in 1941, but there are others who are ashamed of that history. The latter have said to me that “Muslims need pride in their actions when they have done the right thing”, when I talked about the stories of Righteous Muslims.

Who exactly are those seeking boycotts against Yad Vashem speaking for? They are not speaking for the Palestinians. They are also not speaking up for Muslims. They are speaking up for those who want to keep the status quo going, the very status quo that throttled the life and voices out of the stories of Muslims who saved Jews.

Much like Haj Amin al-Husseini, they are on the wrong side of history and worst still, on the side of those who deny the voices of the dead and murdered from speaking to the living today. We cannot allow this to happen, for the sake of all of our histories.

Fiyaz Mughal is the Founder and Director of Faith Matters