Jenny Taylor

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.

Fatwa to be debated as Deoband spokesman says beheading for apostasy is not supported in law.

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.

The problem with this sect is not that it proselytises, but it seems to have so little contact with the outside world.

Read Jenny's article in the Guardian »

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. 

‘Nearly 3,000 mosques could be breaking law over marriage registration’.

A wave of church bombings puts Christians on the frontline in Iraq.

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.]