Lapido’s Handy Book Launch ignites passionate debate about London Megamosque

It was raining violently. I had slithered up the hill to buy tomatoes from Ashraf’s stall for my wife to make lunch. The stall was full of people but Ashraf waved me over. We always enjoy a chat about religion and cricket, those two Pakistani manias, but this time he seemed more serious.

‘There are some people I would like you to meet, brother’, he said.

I followed him to the back of the stall where two tall, also bearded men in white robes and Muslim prayer caps were standing.

‘We want to speak to you about religion,’ he said. ‘We will go to the mosque.’ I agreed.

Despite some misgivings about wandering off with complete strangers, two of whom were heavily bearded and two others who joined us heavily armed, I followed.

When we arrived the two men performed their ablutions and invited me in. When I insisted on performing my own ablutions one of the men, Yasin, came out to wash my feet with his own hands.

They were part of a group of Tablighs who had recently returned from a preaching trip to Bosnia, they said, and had now been sent to the north of Pakistan. When I asked what that work was, they replied:

‘To invite people to join Islam, and to correct those Muslims who have strayed from the true path.’

At this point another member of the group came over. He had recently returned from a preaching trip to Dewsbury, where the European headquarters of the Tablighi Jama’at is located, and spoke some English. After some introductions he launched into what I soon realised was an invitation to join Islam.

He spoke of Jesus and of Mary, of our shared heritage. His discourse was polite but formulaic, as if he had memorised a suitable sermon to give to a Christian and wanted to reel it out verbatim. He eventually finished with an invitation to become a Muslim, but it was an invitation with a rawness which took me by surprise.

‘I admire you for coming to Pakistan to help others’, he said, ‘and I would hate to see you go to hell. Please, accept Islam and come with us to heaven.’

In response, I spoke of my fondness for Pakistan and of the hospitality of the Muslims I had met. I spoke of my gratitude to Yasin for washing my feet, an act which I told him Jesus had performed for his disciples.

I spoke of my sadness for the state of the UK, where only a minority of people worshipped God. Surprisingly, this struck a chord.

‘Absolutely! Almost everyone in Pakistan claims to be a Muslim, but how many care for the poor, for the needy?’

I agreed, suggesting that much of Pakistani Islam was based around a mere outward show of piety. They agreed strongly. Most Muslims were so in name only; their job as members of the Tablighi Jama’at was to call them from outward observance to inward purity. And this, I responded, echoed precisely what Jesus commanded: that his followers be more than just whitewashed sepulchres.

I thanked them for their invitation to join Islam but added that I could not accept it. My belief in a trinitarian God had brought me joy and peace. I hoped that there could be peace between Muslim and Christian.

They seemed appreciative but sad, as though my recalcitrance was the act of a stubborn child who was unwilling to see the obvious. How could I worship Jesus, who was only a man? Was Jesus not the product of a sexual union between God and Mary? I could not get them to see that this is not the Christian belief, which like so much in Islam too, remains a mystery I could live with. Theology is clearly not the best place to start a friendly chat. We disagreed earnestly but politely.

Realising that we had hit a brick wall I left, thanking them for their hospitality and wishing them safety as they travelled north.

I squelched back down the hill – realizing too late I had forgotten the tomatoes.

The first 72 pages are excellent and worthy of 5 stars - lots of facts, information and evidence, and truly outstanding photos.

The book is wrecked - and loses 4 stars - by the all-important Conclusion page (p73) which is fanciful, detached from on-the-ground facts and unwarrantably optimistic about Tablighi Jamaat's claimed conversion (only, please note, in Newham, east London where TJ want to build their mega-mosque) from a fundamentalist socially-hostile and isolationist sect into an open socially-integrated community group.

So I've written an alternative Conclusion as follows:

"This Lapido Media handbook provides a mostly accurate portrayal of Tablighi Jamaat and especially of the background to the group's intention to construct a mega-mosque at West Ham close to the Olympic Park in east London. However regrettably the final Conclusion page is not substantiated by the evidence and is demonstrably distorted over the issue of TJ's claimed metamorphosis into an open, tolerant and socially-engaged community organisation.

"TJ is the most successful missionary movement in global Islam with 80 million adherents worldwide. It is not itself a terrorist organisation although in its homeland of South Asia it is closely associated with violent Islamists such as Harkat-ul-Mujahidin (Sikand 2002) and the Pakistan Taleban (Khan 2006), and a significant number of jihadist plots worldwide have been initiated by TJ adherents. It claims to be non-political. However it was founded in India specifically to assert a strong discrete Islamic identity and to separate and isolate Muslims from the influence of their Hindu neighbours; this social separatism and underlying hostility to non-Muslim society remains firmly embedded in the movement's DNA around the world. For instance a Canadian Islamic specialist wrote: "The TJ has been almost unique... for inspiring in its followers isolationist attitudes which run against the grain of multicultural notions. TJ alone, of all the major Islamic groupings in the Toronto area, has been able to inspire the formation of the rudiments of Muslim ghettos" (Azmi 2000).

"It is unsubstantiated and incorrect for the handbook to conclude that TJ 'rarely' has a unity of methods and ideology across different local contexts. In essentials of belief, values and organisation (Reetz 2006) it is carefully controlled and uniform across the globe. However it is true that after ten years of planning failure on the site at West Ham, TJ unexpectedly engaged the services of non-Muslim architects, public relations agencies and other professional advisers for the project, and asserted to TV cameras that they are "proud to be part of" Britain's multi-cultural multi-faith society (Bhatti 2007). Four years later, faced with the existential threat of Newham Council's enforcement order, they also commenced a thin programme of engagement with the wider non-Muslim local community.

"The all-important question is whether TJ's vaunted conversion into an open and integrated West Ham community group is genuine and would continue after a successful construction of their mega-mosque which, their architect announced last month, would be the size of Battersea Power Station. Or will they just revert to type?"