From Matt Goodwin:
Ugh 🤮. A Muslim matchmaking site operating in the UK advertises virgin wives, urges men to take multiple wives, describes women with a sexual past as “low quality products”, and features a video on when to beat your wife. Is this another sign of “multiculturalism success”?
One suspects that Goodwin has phrased his accusation as a sarcastic question because he knows that the mere existence of some website is a dubious basis on which to draw wider conclusions, although he’s not adverse to making wild extrapolations from casual observations. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, is sure that it “shows yet again how our immigration and integration policies have failed”.
Jenrick is quoted in the Daily Telegraph, which is the source of Goodwin’s post:
NikkahGram, a UK-registered company, describes itself as an Islamic solution for men seeking “a shy, untouched spouse” or wishing to take a second, third or fourth wife.
Virgin women under 35 are promoted as ideal first wives. Those older or with sexual histories are likened to “low quality products”, with their only hope being to share a husband.
The organisation’s social media page features a video on when to beat your wife, as well as claims that sex with non-virgins can cause cancer and that women are intellectually defective.
NikkahGram lists Asif Munaf, a former NHS medic suspended for anti-Semitism, among its staff.
The story appears to have been spun off from an investigation published last week about a website run by Munaf called Dr Sick, which provides medical sicknotes on demand for a fee. For that story, reporters went through the process of buying sicknotes in order to confirm the site’s claims.
Here, though, although the reporter spoke to an unnamed “spokesman”, no investigator registered with the website to see what happens. The site does carry customer testimonials, but these are all anonymised and there isn’t any third-party evidence about the business being active. It should be noted that in 2023 Munaf set up a supposed “University of Masculinity — Muslim Passport Bros” that he said would help British Muslim men find non-feminist brides from Morocco, but that his registered company was dissolved by compulsory strike off in late 2024 without having ever filed any accounts. The only reason it came to wider attention was because Munaf had achieved some celebrity as a contestant on The Apprentice, from which he was removed following allegations of anti-semitic social media posts.
Although there are various companies registered with Companies House containing the word “Nikkah”, there is no “Nikkah Gram” or “Nikkahgram”, and none of them seem to fit the profile. The Nikkahgram website has a page of “Legal Declarations” in which it refers to itself as a “Company” and gives virtual office address in London, but no company number is provided. If the paper has identified a non-obvious registration then one would expect to be told what it is.
Another oddity is that despite claiming to have “exposed” the website, the Telegraph makes no reference to Ustadh Gabriel Al Romaani, even though the “Our Team” page consists solely of him and Munaf, and he has identified himself as the originator of the website. Al Romaani is a Romanian (Hungarian minority, judging from his original Keresztes surname) based in Malaysia who became a Muslim in 2003, and who describes himself as an “Islamic psychology coach”. Like Munaf, he appears to have a focus on masculinity and to belong to an ideological trend that Muslim detractors call the “akh-right”. Munaf has previously promoted Andrew Tate clips on social media, and Al Romaani has also said positive things about him; if the Nikkahgram website represents anything more than self-promoting attention-seeking, then this is the area to be looking into.
UPDATE (9 July): The website was referenced the House of Commons by Reform MP Sarah Pochin, in an Oral Answers to Questions session featuring the Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood:
Pochin: The Secretary of State will be aware of the deeply troubling revelations over the weekend of the so-called Halal bride website. Does she agree that such practices have absolutely no place in Britain?
Mahmood: The regulation of websites and content falls either within Home Office responsibilities for criminal law or with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and I will happily pick up with them the detail around the regulatory issues that are raised by that case.
There was no reason to suppose that Mahmood would have been particularly aware of the Telegraph story, but she provided a businesslike answer to the question of how to explore whether a website might fall foul of the law or regulation due to the “practices” it represents.
As expected, though, Pochin’s purpose was not to seek answers but rather to set the scene for a personalised attack on Mahmood based on her religion. Thus shortly afterwards she appeared with Kevin O’Sullivan (this guy) on Talk TV:
This should be absolutely banned. I asked our own Secretary of State for Justice, a Muslim woman, if she would stop this and she refused to agree that she would stop this. These are the people that are running this country, Kevin. What does this say about the misogynistic culture that is creeping into this country?… This is coming from people established in this country as British Muslims. They are established here as legal immgrants.
The clip has been posed to Twitter/X by Talk TV, along with a further quote attributed to her:
“Shabana Mahmood did NOT agree that it was unacceptable. She should be ashamed of herself. The Labour government is refuses [sic] to answer ANY of my questions.”
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