Controversial plans to build Europe’s biggest mosque close to the London Olympics site have been halted, The Times has learnt.

Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic sect behind the proposal, is to be evicted this week from the East London site, where it has been operating illegally a temporary mosque and had planned a complex that would accommodate 12,000 worshippers.

The Muslim Council of Britain said that the group had fallen victim to “unfounded hostility and hysteria”.

However, another Muslim organisation last night welcomed the move. Minhaj-ul-Quran, which advises the Government on how to combat youth radicalisation, said that a mosque should be a “community effort” and not the initiative of one group with extremist links.

Times, 18 January 2010

Elsewhere in the online version of Times, Ruth Gledhill devotes a puff piece to Minhaj-ul-Quran.

MuQ, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a much smaller, more liberal rival to Tablighi Jamaat. They run a mosque in Forest Gate where they have some local influence. When all the hysteria kicked off about the Tablighi so-called “mega-mosque”, MuQ set up a front organisation, Sunni Friends of Newham, and joined the campaign against it. They were cited by right-wing opponents of the Tablighi plan to show that Muslims were hostile to it too. Admittedly, after a while MuQ appeared to have thought better of forming an anti-Tablighi bloc with racists, and it looked like they had dropped their public opposition. But evidently not.

The reason why the Times is boosting MuQ, in my opinion, is that it’s part of the right-wing agenda of promoting Sufism as some sort of fluffy, harmless alternative to political Islam. In the case of MuQ this is particularly bizarre, as in Pakistan almost all tendencies within Islam (apart from the Tablighis, ironically enough) engage in party politics. MuQ have their own political party there, the Pakistan Awami Tehreek.

“The decision by the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, to ban the group Islam4UK will achieve little.

“As with some previous bans on extremist organisations, the group will simply reorganise under a new name, as it already has on at least one occasion. Worse, though, the Home Secretary appears to have fallen into the trap set him by the group’s notorious but media-savvy leader, Anjem Choudary.

“Mr Choudary has proven himself adept at grabbing publicity for what is apparently an almost entirely paper organisation. His announcement earlier this month that it planned to hold a protest march in Wootton Basset against the war in Afghanistan appears to have had no basis in fact: no application to hold a demonstration was ever made. This did not prevent much of the media from covering it at length, however; now the Home Secretary has simply given Choudary new victim status.

“There are real terrorist organisations that deserve to be banned. But Mr Choudary is telling the truth when he denies that his is a terrorist group: rather, it is a benefit claimants’ exercise in macho fantasy and a prop for his own ego. Most people find Choudary’s views repellent but he should be allowed to express them, if only to remind us just how silly and narcissistic is this armchair warrior from Welling. He will be delighted that Mr Johnson has instead taken the bait as intended.”

Evening Standard, 12 January 2010

Continue reading →

Andrew Gilligan joins the Centre for Social Cohesion in calling for a debate at Queen Mary, University of London between Hizb ut-Tahrir and Brendan O’Neill of Spiked to be banned.

Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2009

No doubt all those people who hopped up and down in indignation at the ban on Geert Wilders will now be rallying to the defence of HT and its right to free expression.