Campaign for Muslim war memorial in London to shut and back West Mids bid
National Muslim War Memorial Trust will close down and transfer its £19,000 balance to the Staffordshire-focused World Wars Muslim Memorial Trust
The National Muslim War Memorial Trust (NMWM), which has been fighting since 2020 for a permanent London memorial to Muslims who served in the British armed forces, will shut and throw its weight — and bank balance — behind a separate campaign for a memorial in the West Midlands.
The NMWM will hand all £19,000 of its funds to the World Wars Muslim Memorial Trust (WWMM), Mohammed Amin, chair of NMWM trustees, announced on Monday.
Both trusts have been campaigning for the establishment of a war memorial dedicated to Muslim servicemen and women who fought in the first and second world wars. WWMM, established in 2016, has its eyes on a memorial in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
The transfer of funds comes just weeks before the 21 July deadline for applicants to bid for £970,000 in government funding to erect a Muslim war memorial. The then Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt first committed the government to erecting a memorial in 2024, initially pledging £1m.
NMWM was first headed by Conservative peer Mohamed Sheikh, with the initial involvement of the Conservative Muslim Forum. The trust, like WWMM, sought to address the fact that there was no monument specifically honouring the service and sacrifice of 1.5 million Muslims who fought in the British Indian Army during the two world wars.
Sheikh’s unexpected death in 2022 served a big blow to the trust, Amin said.
“Over time, it became clear to me and the other trustees that we were not going to be able to achieve the objective of constructing a Muslim war memorial in London,” Amin wrote in a statement. “A project of this kind requires total commitment. The trustees collectively recognised that we were not able to supply this due to our other responsibilities.”
He said the WWMM is “best placed to take forward” the NMWM’s mission.
William Blackburne, chair of the WWMM trustees, said he and his colleagues were “extremely grateful” for the “generous transfer of funds”.
“This donation will be a great boost to our efforts to secure a memorial to the several hundreds of thousands of Muslims who provided a critical, yet often overlooked, contribution to the defence of Britain in the two world wars,” he added.
