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Sunday 7 September 2008

Ken’s mega-mosque will encourage extremism

Irfan al-Alawi and Stephen Schwartz warn that the Olympic mosque has been conceived by Islamic radicals, supported by politically correct politicians, and will add to divisions in Britain

The mosque is designed to be the largest religious structure in Britain. It will accommodate 70,000 people, of whom 40,000 can pray at any given time. According to the latest estimates, it will cost as much as £300 million to build. The complex will be known as the Markaz mosque, ‘markaz’ being the Arabic word for ‘centre’.

Among non-Muslims, the erection of so large a mosque will arouse resentment. But it is provoking unease among Muslims, too. The mosque will have no minarets — Sunni fundamentalists hate minarets — but, rather, a system of wind turbines that will make it look like the set of a science-fiction film. More controversially, however, the project has the backing of the Islamic separatist movement known as Tabligh-i-Jamaat — or Call of the Community.

Tabligh is a missionary Sunni sect that came under serious scrutiny after the atrocities of 9/11. It is not mainstream in its interpretation of Islam. Rather, it is, according to its own claims, ‘reformist’ — like the Saudi-financed Wahabi movement, the extremist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the Jamaatis in Pakistan.

Tabligh representatives insist that their movement is non-violent, but a number of terrorists have passed through its ranks: John Walker Lindh, the American Taleban combatant, was one; Richard Reid, the British ‘shoe bomber’, was another. The Tabligh centre in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, which is the movement’s European headquarters, was often visited by Mohammed Siddique Khan, head of the 7/7 London bomb attack, and by Shehzad Tanweer, one of his accomplices. Tablighis were also under investigation in the alleged Heathrow conspiracy to blow up transatlantic passenger jets last summer.

Although Tabligh followers may not constitute an active jihadist army, their doctrines are unquestionably hostile to other religions and to non-Muslim societies and governments. The movement originated within the Deobandi sect of Islam, which also produced the Taleban, and shares with the Saudi-financed Wahabis a rejection of traditional Islamic spiritual practices. Tabligh preachers have been crucial in the radicalisation of the Pakistani military and intelligence services.

More articles from: Irfan al-Alawi & S. Schwartz | this section

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