Mega Mosque application rejected by council
Author: Sunny Hundal
The Times reports this morning that an Islamic sect’s plan to build a mega-mosque have collapsed. This shouldn’t come as a surprise and was only a matter of time.
Newham Council had come under intense pressure from the media glare when tabloids went overboard in scare-mongering about the impact of the mega-mosque on the fabric of the nation. There were front page stories in the Daily Mail and Daily Express, and petitions by residents who were accused of being BNP members.
But the polarised debate hid the fact that many Muslims themselves felt uncomfortable over the proposed plans.
Ruth Gledhill adds:
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.
Minhaj-ul-Quran isn’t a widely known organisation and clearly the MCB is much larger. But there are several other Muslim organisations and commentators who, while not saying so in public, took a similar view. It’s also likely that by now both the MCB and Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic sect behind the proposal, had given up on the idea. In fact, as the article states, the action was taken because the trust itself had missed a final deadline to lodge a master-plan.
Tablighi Jamaat, is rightly portrayed as a a strict and inward-looking movement, intent on spreading its version of Islam. But it’s a radical movement in the sense that it encourages followers to engage as little as possible with outside society and focus on bettering themselves religiously. It is segregationist more than it is extremist. To many residents of Newham, that in itself was a problem.
