Church leaders in communities with large concentrations of Muslims said that Christians were being targeted. An east London vicar who had delivered Christmas leaflets in his parish said he was told to stay away from “Muslim areas”. He said: “Despite this being a mixed area, where Muslims make up only about 15 per cent of the population, I was told that the leaflets were offensive and could make people angry.”
Another churchman said his path had been blocked by Muslim youths as he drove through a district of Oldham, Lancashire, last year. “They wanted to know why I was coming into ‘their’ area,” he said.
A priest ministering in the Manchester district of Rusholme said he knew of “dozens of cases” in which Muslim converts to Christianity had been attacked. Another church leader said that Asian Christians in Leicester feared being identified when leaving churches.“They are scared of being stopped and beaten up if they are found carrying Bibles,” he said.
None of the church leaders we spoke to wished to be identified for fear of retaliation, but Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said: “It’s increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to live in areas of high Muslim density, especially if they are practising Christians.”
Some commentators fear that the aim of…groups such as Tablighi Jamaat, Hizb-ut-Tahir and the Deobandi sect is to drive non-Muslims out of areas such as Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire, and Oldham along with neighbourhoods in Luton, Leicester, Birmingham and Leyton, in east London.
The…Deobandi movement, which produced the Taliban in Afghanistan and some of whose British followers preach hatred of Christians, Hindus and Jews, is thought to be in control of almost half of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, reports claim.
Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, the director of the Barnabas Trust, which helps persecuted Christians, said: “Muslims are being told not to integrate into British society, but to set up separate enclaves where they can operate according to sharia law.” He said the process of “cleansing” Muslim-majority areas of non-Muslims had already begun, with white residents urged to leave and churches threatened.
Most Britons believe that asylum seekers and immigrants are taking advantage of human rights laws, a survey shows. The poll, carried out for the Ministry of Justice, found that 57 per cent agreed that foreigners and asylum seekers are exploiting the Human Rights Act for their own purposes. Another 40 per cent thought the Act had caused more problems than it had solved.
With regard to the widespread, alarming Deobandi influence among British Muslims, listen to the openly espoused views, and sound Islamic arguments which conclude the contemporary work “Islam and Modernism,” written by a respected modern Muslim scholar Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani.
Mr Usmani, aged 64, sat for 20 years as a Shari’a judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court (His father was the Grand Mufti of Pakistan.) Currently Usmani is deputy of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—the major international body of Islamic nations in the world, and serves as an adviser to several global Sharia-based Islamic financial institutions. Thus he is a leading contemporary figure in the world of mainstream Islamic jurisprudence.
Mr. Usmani is also a regular visitor to Britain. During a recent visit there, he was interviewed by the Times of London, which published extracts from Usmani’s writings on jihad, Saturday, September 8, 2007. The concluding chapter of Usmani’s “Islam and Modernism” was cited, and it rebuts those who believe that only defensive jihad (i.e., fighting to defend a Muslim land deemed under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He also refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a non-Muslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam (which, not surprisingly, was of some concern to The Times!).
For Mr Usmani, “the question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not.” “If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?” He answers his own question as follows: “Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged . . . because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah.” Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practice Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle. He explodes the myths that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking, or that this living institution is somehow irrelevant to our era.
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