With the upcoming mayoral election in London the closest in years, leaders in the Muslim community are hitting the streets to get out the vote for Ken Livingstone, the often-controversial liberal incumbent. Activists from a number of major Muslim organizations said this month that they wanted to see Livingstone defeat Boris Johnson, the rival candidate from the Conservative Party with whom he has been virtually tied in recent polls. Not only has Livingstone been a staunch friend of the Muslim community, they said, but Johnson has a long record of insensitive and borderline racist remarks and would be a disaster for ethnic relations. "Muslims think a lot more strategically when giving their votes," said Ahmed Al-Rawi, president of the Muslim Association of Britain. "Ken Livingstone has been an outstanding ambassador for London and Britain."
In the weeks leading up to the May 1 election, activists say they have been distributing pamphlets on the street, going door to door in heavily Muslim neighborhoods and working with mosques to get their message out. Muslims are concentrated in some eastern parts of the British capital but also are spread throughout the city, ranging from newly arrived immigrants from all over the world as well as those who have been in England for generations.
While they have been traditionally seen as sitting on the political sidelines, they helped pull off one of the major upsets in the 2005 general election, electing maverick leftwing politician George Galloway to Parliament from the East End neighborhood of Bethnal Green and Bow. Working hand in hand with members of the Socialist Workers Party, Muslim voters unseated Oona King, a prominent supporter of the Iraq war.
With barely a third of Londoners voting in the last mayoral election, Catherine Heseltine, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, said on Thursday that large numbers of Muslims going to the polls could be "decisive."
Livingstone, a longtime member of the left-leaning Labor Party and mayor since 2000, has been lauded for speaking out against Islamophobia, as well as helping organize a number of large Muslim-themed events. However, he has also drawn flak for being a highly public supporter of Palestinian causes and for inviting Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Islamic scholar from Egypt, to speak at city hall in 2005.
On the other side of the political aisle, Johnson has a reputation for being a throwback to the high-handed upper-class Tories of yesteryear, with a long list of inflammatory quotes from his years as a journalist and Member of Parliament. In 2002, when writing about former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Africa, he was forced to apologize for referring to Africans as "picaninnies." After the terrorist attacks on the London subway system in 2005, he wrote that "Islam is the problem" and it was the "most viciously sectarian of all religions."
Adding fuel to an already heated campaign, the London Evening Standard on Wednesday published an investigative article which charged Muslims for Ken, one of the groups organizing voters, as having links to "hardline" Islamic groups. Muslims for Ken spokesman Anas Altikriti immediately hit back, saying that the story was "riddled with lies" and that his group would be contacting the Press Complaints Commission, the independent media commission that deals with concerns over accuracy in newspapers.