Mick Hartley

It’s good to see Britain’s libraries catering for their multicultural audience:

Public libraries serving the densest population of Muslims in London have been inundated with extremist literature, according to a report.

Multiple copies of books were found in Tower Hamlets that would feature on any jihadist reading list, the report obtained by the BBC said.

Tower Hamlets Council said their Islamic collections had been imbalanced, but they were improving.

The report was by right-leaning think tank the Centre for Social Cohesion.

A minor point – and I have no information as to the politics of the Centre for Social Cohesion – but I doubt the BBC would bother noting that a particular think tank was left-leaning.

Two books by Abu Hamza al-Masri, who used to preach at Finsbury Park mosque, are in the collection, as is one book by Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, whose lectures inspired two of the London bombers.

Both men have been convicted of incitement to murder, but not on the basis of these writings.

The former Islamist Ed Hussain, who grew up in Tower Hamlets, said: “The shocking thing is that this stuff is available and there are people out there borrowing it…

The Tower Hamlets collections also include multiple works by the founders of modern political Islam, Sayed Qutb and Sayed Abdullah Maududi, and a large number of texts from Saudi scholars, promoting the Wahhabi fundamentalist school of thought.

These, the report says, refer to “incredible hatred of women, incredible hatred of non-Muslims… and of Muslims who are not part of the Wahhabi tradition”.

The report’s authors counted 61 separate copies of Maududi’s books including the classic Al Jihad, in which he states: “The objective of Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule… the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution.”

There were also 11 copies of Sayed Qutb’s Milestones, which is highly sought after by jihadists.

There were 20 copies of books by the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, and 16 copies of a book by modern day Saudi scholar Muhammad Jamil Zino.

Zino’s book What a Muslim Should Believe offers advice in the form of hypothetical questions.

“Is it allowed to support and love disbelievers?” he asks. The answer is simply “no”.