Mick Hartley

Where are the moderate Muslims? goes the cry. Well, here’s one – Dr T. Hargey, Chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford – writing to the Times today about the controversial plans for a super mosque next to the Olympic site in East London:

The Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford (MECO) is strongly opposed to the building of the proposed “super mosque” near the Olympic village in East London (report, March 22). This is sponsored by the ultra-orthodox Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), whose agenda is to transform the site into the headquarters for radical Wahhabi sectarianism in the UK.

More than any other radical Muslim group in the UK, TJ has sought to deepen the growing marginalisation of British Muslims by highlighting their isolation from the mainstream. TJ followers are known to support a virulent, intolerant version of Islam which supports women being fully covered and endorses medieval Saudi tribal rulings relating to apostasy, jihad, blasphemy, the oppression of women and religious exclusivity. None of the above is sanctioned in the Koran.

TJ seeks to make this £75 million mosque the magnet for religious fundamentalists and cultural supremacists within Britain’s Muslim community. Rather than promoting an inclusive, pluralistic Muslim faith rooted in and relevant to 21st-century Britain, TJ wishes to promote a reactionary tendency which is gaining ground. A slick marketing campaign and the commissioning of new architects for the Abbey Mills mosque cannot conceal the potential threat it poses.

MECO therefore calls upon all forward-looking British Muslims to protest against the proposed mosque. Failure to prevent it will result in a Saudi-influenced and financed Islamic ideology that will generate greater social friction instead of community cohesion in contemporary Britain. This key battle is one which all integrated British Muslims, and the British people at large, must win.

[The link to the Times report mentioned in the letter is currently down.]