Recently Islamic charities have faced criticism from many sides. David Ainsworth examines the subject.

Muslim charities have had a hard time of it, of late. The Commissioner of the Met thinks they’re raising money for terrorists. HSBC won’t give them bank accounts. And accusations are flying back and forth that the Charity Commission has it in for them. Even the Prime Minister, when he announced £8m of extra funding for the Commission, more or less said the cash was to hunt down Muslim extremists.

The national press seems to have it in for them, too. Not least The Times, which last Monday wrote a comment piece calling for more transparency around the Commission’s investigation into potential terrorist organisations, but also giving the impression that it thought Commission chair William Shawcross was a bit soft, and should toughen up his act a bit.

(Shawcross isn’t a natural candidate for that kind of treatment. He did after all once say terrorism was the biggest threat the sector faced. The majority of complaints from within the charity sector are in the other direction – that he’s lost all proportion and become obsessed with terrorists to the exclusion of all else.)

There is, as you’d expect, a bit of a backlash to all of this. The Muslim Charities Forum has come out swinging in defence of its members, as have NCVO and Acevo. Sir Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, wrote to The Times to say that the kind of “zero tolerance machismo” the paper wanted was unhelpful. The MCF and NCVO invited the Charity Commission to dinner to tackle the Commission over its perceived bias.

A report by Claystone, a think tank, says the Commission has become disproportionately interested in terrorism, and is targeting Muslim charities as a result. It points out that Muslim charities are the subject of 38 per cent of all disclosed statutory investigations. The Commission says disclosed investigations are only part of the total, and it’s actually closer to 15 per cent. But this is still pretty high, given that Muslim charities are less than 1 per cent of those on the register. (The Commission also says it doesn’t define charities as Muslim and non-Muslim, so it can’t give a definitive figure for how many there are, but we can take a rough guess).

The Commission itself has gone to pains to deny accusations of bias. Its senior figures are getting quite annoyed with the amount of attention being given to the issue. Paula Sussex, the Commission’s chief executive, went as far as to say something to the effect that not only was there obviously no anti-Muslim bias, but that there was only so much clean oxygen in the world, and it was a shame we were using it up talking about the subject. Shawcross himself wrote to say the Commission was not, as The Times suggested, placing Muslim charities under “secret surveillance”.

Despite this the paper is still using the term today.

So what’s really going on?

Should Muslim charities be investigated more often than others?

Well if we’re completely honest, probably, yes.

It’s not a particularly easy thing to write, because there’s already an atmosphere of paranoia about Islam in so many quarters, and I don’t want to join in. But let’s try to be impartial. First, religious charities in general seem to attract more investigations than other types of charity. Quite why isn’t clear. It could be down to a structure which favours a single strong leader, the expectation of unquestioning generosity, and strongly held and impossible-to-question beliefs.

But on top of that, there’s the fact that Islam does have an extremist fringe. The connection with terrorism is a completely separate thing to the common-or-garden issues which seem disproportionately likely to affect other religious organisations – trustees falling out, money going missing, and records not being kept.

(It’s easy to criticise Islam for extremism, but it’s worth remembering that for most of history it’s been the other way around. Historically, the great Islamic empires allowed Christians and Jews to practise their faith freely, while religious fanatics in England were banning card playing, dancing and Christmas. When it comes to pogroms, fatwahs and holy wars, Western Europe still has more entries in the ledger than the Middle East.)

The problem here is separating the hype from the truth, because while there are a lot of radical Muslims out there, including some working in charities, there are probably nowhere near as many as people think.

Behavioural scientists tell us that the human brain doesn’t deal well with the abstraction “a lot but less than you think” and tends to just pick one or the other. The media mostly seem to have just focused on the “a lot” part of that statement.

Is the Commission disproportionately targeting Muslim charities?

With all of the above in mind, it seems likely that Muslim charities should be well represented among organisations investigated. But I still tend to think they’re a bit too well represented. The current Commission figures suggest that almost one wrongdoer in six in the charity sector is a Muslim. That seems implausible.

I’m pretty sure the Commission are striving as hard as they can to be neutral. They’ve been at pains to deny any bias, and they take their reputation as fair and impartial regulators very seriously. I doubt very much that they’d put that at risk. Previously the Commission has faced accusations that it’s far too cautious and risk-averse. That doesn’t sound like the type of organisation to go around unfairly targeting Muslims.

William Shawcross can give the impression of having a personal issue with Islam, but the rest of the regulator decidedly does not. And in the last six months even Shawcross has been much more guarded in his utterances.

So how is this coming about?

I suspect mostly it’s reporting bias. After all, the Commission can only investigate the things it knows about, and Muslim charities keep coming to its attention, because people are watching them closely. Once a charity potentially involved in wrongdoing comes to its attention, what is it supposed to do? Ignore it?

There may also by now be confirmation bias. Experience of looking into Muslim charities and finding wrongdoing must by now have taught the Commission’s investigators that if you do look into a Muslim charity, there’s likely to be something dodgy going on. If you go looking for crooks and crackpots in any walk of life, sooner or later you’re going to find them. Which is going to justify your belief it was right to look for them.

So what now?

The position the Commission is placed in is basically pretty tricky. According to those making demands on its time last week, it’s supposed to investigate all terrorist organisations, make this a top priority and be completely transparent about the process it’s engaged in, but without being alarmist, creating publicity which might harm the good work done by genuine charities, or appearing to have a bias against Muslims.

Clearly it’s impossible to do all those things. You can either hide who you’re investigating in order to not stir up trouble, or tell everyone and be transparent, but risk stirring things up.

The Commission says it’s not biased, and wants everyone to stop talking about it. But I disagree.

We can’t just say there’s nothing to see here. It’s not enough to be unbiased. You must also present the appearance of being unbiased. And that means communicating proactively and at exhaustive length on the subject, even if there are, in your view, more important things to do.

But it’s not just the Charity Commission which has a problem here, although it has to take a lead. There are all sorts of other players – Muslim organisations themselves, the rest of the sector, the government, the public and the press.

Muslim leaders, a bit like the Commission, are caught in a cleft stick. They can hardly deny extremism, or apologise for it, but they need to make it clear that a lot of good people are being tarred with the same brush. I would imagine there are a lot of good people in the Muslim community who are now so annoyed with the flak they’re taking from the public, the press and the State that they aren’t really in the mood to be conciliatory, which isn’t going to make it easier.

There are also a lot of people talking about charities who are mostly focused on other things - people like Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe whose job is to chase after terrorists. Those people are a problem because they aren’t aware of – or all that interested in – the collateral damage their words may cause among ordinary organisations.

I think the burden really falls on ordinary charities to make sure they support Muslim organisations, to weed out their own unconscious prejudice, and to try and avoid seeing the whole sector as a monolithic entity. It’s good to see Acevo and NCVO speaking out on this one. But tempting as it might be, they need to do so in a non-confrontational way, or they risk exacerbating a problem they are trying to solve.