The UK Home Office has granted a string of Islamic bookshops the power to sponsor Skilled Worker visas, allowing them to bring migrants into Britain even as those same stores sell texts by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues that promote antisemitism, the overthrow of secular governments through jihad, and guidance on beating wives.
An investigation has revealed that these shops have issued dozens of certificates of sponsorship. One Birmingham bookshop alone has issued up to 16 since 2021. An east London outlet has sponsored as many as 18. A Leicester-area operation and two further east London businesses, including one in Tower Hamlets, have each been linked to up to 10.
Among the titles on their shelves is Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, the influential Muslim Brotherhood thinker executed in Egypt in 1966. The book argues for the toppling of all secular governments through “physical power and jihad” and their replacement with sharia regimes.
Several shops also stock Qutb’s In the Shade of the Qur’an, which contends that Jewish people “try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind” and possess a “wicked nature.”
Works by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna appear alongside writings by Bilal Philips, a cleric already barred from the UK by the Home Office. Philips’s The Fundamentals of Tawheed includes guidance on wife-beating and states that “un-Islamic government must be sincerely hated and despised.”
UK Prison Service inspectors flagged the latter text as extremist material in 2016 and ordered it removed from prison chaplaincies.
None of these publications are illegal under current UK law, and some are available on mainstream platforms. There is no suggestion the shops themselves have broken the law. Yet the Home Office has still handed them official sponsorship licences under the Skilled Worker route.
Hellbound and Down 