Activities:

During 2012 the Nigerian media has reported that the country’s state security service, working with local and international agencies, believes money raised by the Al Muntada Trust found its way to Boko Haram.

A charity of that name, which has its headquarters in London, raises money for disaster projects in Africa. It has attracted controversy in the past for giving a platform to radical clerics.

The Al-Muntada Trust is an international charitable organisation, initially founded in the United Kingdom which aims to provide food, education and community outreach in impoverished countries.

Although the organization has done good work in these areas, it has also been heavily criticised for its links to militant Islamist organizations and support for Islamic fundamentalism, as described in a 2005 report from The Center for Security Policy: Al-Muntada has, incidentally, been particularly active in promoting Wahhabi-style Islamism in Nigeria. As explained by a Sufi of Kano state, “before al-Muntada came to Kano there had been little or no inter-religious conflict…Now…we are almost on the verge of civil war.” Al-Muntada, he explains, pays for Nigerian clerics to be “brainwashed” in Saudi universities and imposed on Nigerian Muslims through its well-funded network of mosques and schools.

The charity funded an armed group that launched a rebellion in Yobe State in 2004, and it has reportedly also given funds to the brutal paramilitary group Boko Haram.

In 2004 the charity’s director, Sheik Muhiddeen Abdullahi, was arrested. It was discovered that he had conducted millions of dollars worth of financial transactions with the fundamentalist cleric Alhaji Sharu.