Showing posts with label Regent's Park Mosque. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Regent's Park Mosque. Show all posts

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Revealed: The Real Islam?

"To think, as I believe our government thinks, that it makes ideological sense to play patsy with the Saudi government is folly of the first order of magnitude. We will be paying for it for years to come." - Professor Anthony Glees, Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies at Brunel University [Source: The Sunday Times]

MAIL Online: The Saudi Arabian preachers were secretly filmed ordering women to murder gays and ex-Muslims.
Undercover reporters from Channel 4’s Dispatches recorded the lectures in the women’s section of Regent’s Park Mosque in London.

An unnamed Saudi woman is seen mocking other religions – labelling Christianity ‘vile’ and an ‘abomination’. Another, known as ‘Angelique’, claims Britain is a ‘land of evil’.

The investigators attended lectures for two months at the mosque, which had promised a clean-up after another Dispatches probe just 18 months ago exposed it for spreading extreme Islamic views.

During one sermon, a woman called Um Amira says: ‘He is Muslim, and he gets out of Islam...what are we going to do? We kill him, kill, kill.’

In the programme, to be screened tomorrow, she adds that women adulterers should be stoned to death and people who have sex before marriage should get ‘100 lashes’. Revealed: Saudi Women Preaching Hate in the British Mosque that Promised to Clean Up Its Act 18 Months Ago >>> By Tom Harper | August 30. 2008

THE SUNDAY TIMES: Britain's leading Muslim bodies say they are fighting extremism. In one of our most respected mosques, Sara Hassan came face to face with hardline female preachers of separatism. Here, she reports on the shocking results of her investigation

In a large balcony above the beautiful main hall at Regent's Park Mosque in London - widely considered the most important mosque in Britain - I am filming undercover as the woman preacher gives her talk.

What should be done to a Muslim who converts to another faith? "We kill him," she says, "kill him, kill, kill…You have to kill him, you understand?"

Adulterers, she says, are to be stoned to death - and as for homosexuals, and women who "make themselves like a man, a woman like a man ... the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place".

These punishments, the preacher says, are to be implemented in a future Islamic state. "This is not to tell you to start killing people," she continues. "There must be a Muslim leader, when the Muslim army becomes stronger, when Islam has grown enough."

A young female student from the group interrupts her: the punishment should also be to stone the homosexuals to death, once they have been thrown from a high place.

These are teachings I never expected to hear inside Regent's Park Mosque, which is supposedly committed to interfaith dialogue and moderation, and was set up more than 60 years ago, to represent British Muslims to the Government. And many of those listening were teenage British girls or, even more disturbingly, young children.

My investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches came after last year's Undercover Mosque, which investigated claims that teachings of intolerance and fundamentalism were spreading through Britain's mosques from the Saudi Arabian religious establishment - which is closely linked to the Saudi Arabian government. In response, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia denied it was spreading intolerance, while Regent's Park Mosque, which featured in the film, urged all mosques to be "vigilant" and monitor what was taught on their premises.

So earlier this year, dressed in a full Islamic jilbaab, I went back to Regent's Park Mosque to see what was being taught there. As a woman, I had to go to the main female section, where I found this circle preaching every Saturday and Sunday, eight hours at a time, to any woman who has come to pray.

The mosque is meant to promote moderation and integration. But although the circle does preach against terrorism and does not incite Muslims to break British laws, it teaches Muslims to "keep away" and segregate themselves from disbelievers: "Islam is keeping away from disbelief and from the disbelievers, the people who disbelieve."

Friendship with non-Muslims is discouraged because "loyalty is only to the Muslim, not to the kaffir [disbeliever]". 
A woman who was friendly with a non-Muslim woman was heavily criticised: "It's part of Islam, of the correct belief, that you love those who love Allah and that you hate those who hate Allah." Preachers of Separatism at Work Inside Britain's Mosques >>> | August 31, 2008

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