Around 300 worshippers from Finsbury Park Mosque staged a protest outside HSBC this afternoon in anger at the bank’s decision to close their account.

The demonstrators chanted “HSBC shame on you” and held placards outside the Seven Sisters Road branch at around 2.30pm.

The action came after the St Thomas’s Road mosque received a letter in July telling them their account would be shut – they say without any reason.

Khalid Oumar, secretary of the mosque’s board of trustees, said: “The protest went to plan and it was good to see people out there. At the end we delivered a petition with 1000 signatures to the bank’s senior manager.

“To be honest, it’s no longer about keeping the account. They sent us a second letter, which is worse than the first because it seeks our sympathy and understanding, telling us their decisions was not based on religion or race. But as we shouted at outside the bank ‘give us a reason’.

“They still haven’t told us why they closed the account, so we can’t learn from it, or even amend it. This is no way to deal with us and the main victims are the people who use the centre, because we’re a registered charity.”

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The National Council of Voluntary Organisations has promised to raise concerns voiced by Muslim charities at meetings with a number of banks and the Charity Commission.

Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the NCVO, met senior figures at Muslim Aid, the Muslim Charities Forum, and Muslim Hands on Wednesday.

They discussed concerns about how banks treat Muslim charities after it was reported last month that HSBC had served Muslim charities Ummah Welfare Trust and Finsbury Park Mosque with notices that their accounts would be closed. It was also reported that similar letters had been received by people connected to the non-charitable Islamic think tank the Cordoba Foundation. The reasons HSBC gave for closing the accounts were that they fell outside of the bank’s “risk appetite”, but it was suggested discrimination was behind the decisions – a charge HSBC has denied.

Etherington now intends to convene a meeting with several banks in the next few weeks to discuss the issue.

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The Halal Authority Board (HAB) has written an open letter to the British Veterinary Association (BVA), accusing it of “continuous attacks against the Muslim and Jewish communities”.

In response to the BVA president Robin Hargreaves’ appeals to UK party leaders to end non-stun slaughter, HAB head of certification Shaykh Tauqir Ishaq wrote in the letter: “Your comments appear to have no bearing on animal welfare issues, rather appear racially or politically motivated.”

Shaykh Tauqir Ishaq added: “There is less than 2.1% of the entire meat production being un-stunned compared to 4.8% Muslim population. Additionally, Muslims statistically over-consume on sheep and poultry and under-consume on beef, with zero pig consumption, so any comparisons should take these into account, but they do not.”

The HAB expressed annoyance that there were areas of blatant cruelty that needed to be addressed, which affected the whole life of animals in the UK, but the BVA was focusing just on slaughter – “the last few seconds”.

The HAB went on to list 10 areas of meat production which it believed the BVA should address as more serious matters for animal welfare. These included: tagging, chickens bred for eggs, pig farrowing, castration, transportation, battery cages, dehorning, laboratory procedures and force feeding.

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