Britain

Great Southern Mosque

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The shadow cast by a mega-mosque

When Abu Izzadeen, the firebrand Islamist militant, berated John Reid last week for "daring" to visit a Muslim area, the Home Secretary bridled, as did many others, at his suggestion that part of London was off limits for a British minister of the Crown.

There was nowhere in this country from which anyone should be excluded, Mr Reid said; nowhere that could be called exclusively Muslim. He was speaking just a couple of Tube stops from West Ham, close to the site for the 2012 Olympic stadium, where a huge row is about to erupt over plans to construct a mosque. However, this is not any old mosque built to serve the local community. It will be the largest place of worship in Europe, a gigantic three-storey Islamic centre, with schools and other facilities, able to hold at least 40,000 worshippers and up to 70,000 if necessary.

It will be called the London Markaz and it is intended to be a significant Islamic landmark whose prominence and stature will be enhanced by its proximity to the Olympic site. When television viewers around the world see aerial views of the stadium during the opening ceremony in six years' time, the most prominent religious building in the camera shot will not be one of the city's iconic churches that have shaped the nation's history, such as St Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, but the mega-mosque.

Its arrival in London will be a significant coup for Islam and a major event for the country as a whole. It will also make Abu Izzadeen's depiction of that part of east London as "a Muslim area" seem remarkably prescient ...

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Muslim group behind ‘mega-mosque’ seeks to convert all Britain

A Muslim group that wants to open a giant £100 million mosque in London has set its sights on “winning the whole of Britain to Islam”.

Tablighi Jamaat aims to build an Islamic complex near to the site of the 2012 Olympic stadium, with a mosque for 12,000 people, by far the largest religious building in Britain.

The organisation, which has millions of followers worldwide, insists that it is a peaceful, apolitical revivalist movement that promotes Islamic consciousness among individual Muslims. However, intelligence agencies have cautioned that the group’s ability to fire young men with a zeal for Islam acts as a staging post, for some, along a path that leads to jihadist terrorism.

Kafeel Ahmed, the Indian doctor who died from burns last month after trying to set off a car bomb at Glasgow Airport, is the latest in a line of terrorists for whose initial radicalisation Tablighi Jamaat has been blamed. The group (literally, the preaching party) belongs to the ultra-conservative Deobandi school of thought within Sunni Islam, whose adherents run more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques ...

Yoginder Sikand, a Muslim expert on the movement, says that its ethos of “social and cultural separatism and insularity” seeks “to minimise contacts with people of other faiths”.

The self-segregation that this encourages is evident in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where the group has its European headquarters. The Tablighi Jamaat complex – housing its large Markazi mosque and a Deobandi seminary called the Islamic Institute of Education - is based in the Savile Town area, which has an 88 per cent Asian population. The overwhelming majority of its 5,000 residents are Muslims from Pakistan or the Gujarat region of India and some, at home and at work, have little contact with nonMuslims.

More than 250,000 people have signed a Downing Street petition against the London mosque ...

“The mega-mosque complex would become a flagship for Tablighi Jamaat’s mission to indoctrinate Muslims with a hatred of the West and the kuffar [non-Mulims].”