Centre planned by Islamic group

By Glen Munro

Horticulture Week, 27 July 2006

A religious group is planning to build a £100m Islamic centre in east London with substantial landscaping features.

Abbey Mills Islamic Centre is the vision of the Islamic group Tablighi Jamaat. The complex would occupy 50,000 sq m in the Lower Lee Valley. It has been described as a long, undulating building, influenced by the “nomadic structures and the tented cities” of Islam. At night, it would be illuminated by millions of translucent tiles.

Mangera Yvars, the south London-based architects’ firm behind the centre, has said landscaping will be a big component of the project. The centre would be surrounded by an Islamic garden, to include vegetable gardens at the rear of the site and a dining piazza overlooking the Channelsea River.

“It is a landscape structure, not an edifice,” said project architect Ali Mangera. “The theme is centred around Islamic gardens, where there are water features with cool, contemplative spaces of shade.”

There will also be a mosque courtyard on the first floor, an open courtyard on the dome of the mosque and an outdoor forum space that is intended as an inter-faith discussion area.

The contract for the landscaping has not yet been offered for tender and the budget is in the process of being reviewed, while the parameters of the site in conjunction with the Olympic Village are under discussion.

Tablighi Jamaat said the centre would be open to anyone, without any obligation to be a member to the group.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee has issued a call for complaints to be made in response to the case of Sohail Ashraf and Khurram Zeb, the two innocent Asian students who were marched off a Monarch  jet at gunpoint because other passengers feared they were terrorists:

We request you to make your feelings known to Monarch airline as well as the Department of Transport using the following contact details, calling for an apology by the airline and stating clearly that you object to the victimisation of particularly Muslim passengers because of their appearance and creed.

MOREOVER should the airline decline to make an official apology we will be calling for a complete boycott of all travel with the airline.

Copy all of these organisations in your email!

Monarch Airlines

• Geoff Atkinson – Monarch Group Lawyer and Company Secretary
• Tel: 01582 398 043
• Send your complaints by clicking here.

Copy the message to:

• Department for Transport Aviation Team – responsible for all aviation policy!
• David McMillan (Director of Aviation) david.mcmillan@dft.gsi.gov.uk

“The fundamental mistake made after 9/11 was that any stirrings of a debate addressing the root causes of the terror were ruthlessly suppressed…. Rather than addressing the known political causes, the terrorist attacks were portrayed as a religious struggle: radical Islam v the west.

“Al-Qaida was supposed to have conducted the 9/11 attacks because it deplores western values – its freedom, its democracy – and desires the establishment of a global empire of Islamic emirates. But as Robert Fisk makes clear in his book, The Great War for Civilisation, Osama bin Laden’s rage against the US arose from its support for Israel, the Saudi monarchy, and the garrisoning of US troops in the land of Islam’s holiest sites.

“The very deliberate policy of converting political struggles into religious ones had a very specific purpose: to induce fear of an impending threat to western way of life from encroaching radical Islam so that the population of the west would fall in line behind Bush and his neocon policies. Radical Muslims – and now ‘Islamic fascists’ – were as deadly as communism and Nazism. Unless the American public blindly supported every Bush policy in countering terrorism, the whole of western civilisation was imperilled.”

Imran Khan at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 26 August 2006

“The plain fact is, in a diverse, multi-faith society such as ours, it would be foolish to believe that we can continue to unleash devastation upon peoples abroad while expecting there to be no social consequences back at home.”

Inayat Bunglawala points out that Ruth Kelly’s call for an “honest debate” on the causes of extremism rings a little hollow when the terms of reference of the new Commission on Integration and Cohesion explicitly exclude”foreign policy’s relationship to radical Islamism”.

Comment is Free, 25 August 2006