Jenny Taylor's blog

I admit I was apprehensive.  The words Deobandi Dar-ul-Uloom had haunted me for years – and here I was preparing to drive there to check it out.

Just a 20-minute drive west of Varanasi, where the gods that decreed the caste system are still worshipped with fire, live the poorest people on earth.

They are the Musaha, the ‘rat people’, who have nothing else to live off but the field rodents with whom they have adapted a remarkable partnership.

In a dusty old chapel behind the Civil Lines in Delhi, prayers of thanksgiving will be said at noon today by three Indian priests for a planning decision a long way away - in Westminster.

They – and we, for I am their guest - will give thanks for the fight to save St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, Mayfair in the Parish of Charing Cross, West London.

Hopes of a British Islam may be closer to being realized than people think. And it’s not good news.

I turned up unannounced last week at the Dewsbury markaz – so-called European headquarters of the Tablighi Jama’at, in its unlikely green and rolling Yorkshire milltown setting. 

An anonymous clergyman accused the Church of England of ‘institutional opposition to the gospel’ at the launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) in London today.

He told the conference at Westminster Central Hall how his church plant had been hounded out of several venues by the Area Dean, accused of being a ‘cult’.

A recording of the nameless priest was relayed to the audience of 1600 Anglicans during the afternoon sessions.

[This blog was published by Times Online http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/07/praying-for-patients-debate-taking-place-now.html on 1 July 2009.]

Anyone interested in Pope Benedict XVI and his attitude to Islam was expecting a field day during his recent Middle East visit.   

Would he apologize for his earlier ‘gaffes’, as the Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan demanded?  Would he make more statements that would incite volatile Muslim communities?   

I realized quite suddenly that I was in love with India.  It had been building up, from admittedly inauspicious beginnings.  The suffocating yellow dust of Delhi, the huddled poor in filthy rags sitting by miserable little fires on every patch of waste ground; the scabby dogs and dying puppies; the way nothing ever seems to be finished off, or final; the traffic that careens crazily along pitted highways; the way no one, literally no one, can drive in a straight line, or give way.

We travelled through a seeming paradise all day yesterday to get to the edge of hell. All day the calm beauty of the Orissa countryside seduced us. White long-horned cattle against deep red sandstone-mud cottages; thatched hay-ricks on stilts, the harvest safely gathered in. An old man in a fine white handspun dhoti walking calmly behind his single cow, umbrella aloft against the still fierce winter sun. A small boy with a string of shells and tiny bells around his loins. Women in dazzling saris washing clothes in ponds full of lotus flowers.

India, the home of Bollywood; the world’s biggest democracy; the new super-power. India the land of dreams. This is what it’s convenient for us in the West to believe about this enormous country.  But leave Delhi by train and it’s impossible to avoid the truth.