By far the grandest Islamic place of worship in Britain is the London Central Mosque. At the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940, Winston Churchill offered the site of this splendid building as a gift from the British people to its Muslim citizens. For more than half a century its gleaming golden dome has nestled among the whitewashed Nash terraces in Regent’s Park, whose residents include, among others, the U.S. ambassador. Up to 5,000 people go there for Friday prayers—far more than worship at St. Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey. Many of the faithful visit the mosque’s bookshop, where they might well pick up DVD’s by those listed on the mosque’s website as its “famous visitors.”
One of these is the American Muslim preacher Sheikh Khalid Yasin, director of the Islamic teaching institute. But Sheikh Yasin is a Wahhabi extremist. His DVD’s denounce the “delusion” of equality for women and demand the death penalty for homosexuals. He accuses the World Health Organization and Christian missionaries of a “conspiracy” to create the AIDS epidemic in Africa and denies that 9/11 had anything to do with “the so-called al Qaeda.”
Another celebrity imam whose DVD’s are on sale at the mosque is Sheikh Feiz Muhammad, who preaches at the Global Islamic Youth Center in Liverpool, New South Wales. Notorious in Australia for his claim that women who are raped “have nobody to blame but themselves,” Sheikh Feiz is seen in one of his DVD’s imitating a pig: “This creature will say, ‘Oh Muslim, behind me is a Jew. Come and kill him.’ They [the Jews] will be [he makes snorting noises]. All of them. Every single one of them.”
These remarks are similar to those of a third “famous visitor,” the Egyptian Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a well-known al-Jazeera commentator: “Everything will be on our side and against Jews on [judgment day]. At that time, even the stones and the trees will speak, with or without words, and say: ‘Oh servant of Allah, oh Muslim, there’s a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
The former Pakistani ambassador to Great Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, resigned as a trustee of the London Central Mosque in 1996 because he felt it had been taken over by Wahhabism, backed by Saudi money. But a mega-mosque for up to 70,000 worshippers to be built in the East End of London will dwarf the one in Regent’s Park. The London Markaz, funded by the Saudi-backed organization Tablighi Jamaat, will be built next to the site of the 2012 Olympics. If Wahhabi ideology has already taken over the most prestigious mosque in Britain, why is Tony Blair’s government allowing the same thing to happen again on a much bigger scale? As the largest mosque in Europe arises in London, Muslims could be forgiven for supposing that the conversion of Britain to Wahhabi Islam is only a matter of time.
