Gatherings of top religious leaders and even some heads of state will take place this year in the United States, at the Vatican, and in Britain, aimed at defusing tensions between the West and the Muslim world.

The first-of-their-kind dialogues ”“ which will kick off in July ”“ will begin with theological discussions but seek practical results. Yet they’re stirring some debate within the faith groups as to the proper way to engage “the other” and whether common ground can be found.

The initiative was sparked last October by “A Common Word Between Us and You,” an open letter from 138 Muslim clergy and scholars from more than 40 nations to the leaders of all the world’s major Christian churches. Concerned that “the future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians,” the Muslim leaders proposed dialogue on the basis of the shared principles of “the love of God, and love of the neighbor.”

Most of the churches responded positively, buoyed both by the letter and the authority of those who signed it ”“ representing most schools of Muslim thought.

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Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that “the law of the Church of England is the law of the land” there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.

Then all hell broke loose. From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world’s second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign. Williams has spent the last couple of years trying to hold together the global Anglican Communion in the face of continuing controversies about ordaining gay priests and recognizing same-sex marriages. Yet little in that contentious battle subjected him to the kind of outcry that his reference to religious courts unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams’s mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word “Shariah” that was radioactive.

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them ”” hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

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Muslim representatives and Vatican officials meet Tuesday for talks that will hopefully lead to an unprecedented Catholic-Islamic meeting later this year focusing on terrorism. The meetings are an attempt to improve relations after a 2006 speech by Pope Benedict XVI in which he quoted an ancient emperor’s criticism of Islam.

Listen to it all from NPR.

An influential group of Muslim theologians at a prominent Islamic seminary in northern India have denounced terrorism, saying it is goes against the teachings of Islam.

The denouncement came during the All India Anti-Terrorism Conference in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to the 150-year-old Darul Uloom Deoband Islamic seminary.

Opening the conference, the seminary’s vice chancellor, Maulana Margoobur Rahman, called terrorism a thoughtless act that is “un-Islamic” and prohibited by the Quran.

“Islam preaches the tenets of peace, justice and brotherhood. There is no place for terror and violence in Islam,” Rahamn said in his address, which was read by a deputy. “Allah will never have mercy on those elements who think they are serving the faith by perpetrating violence.”

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Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university’s recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying “Salamu aleykum,” or “Peace be upon you,” a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members.

“I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis,” said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005.

Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

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It was already quite clear in the Archbishop’s lecture that he was not advocating a system of ”˜parallel’ courts or jurisdictions as exist in countries with arrangements known as ”˜legal pluralism’, such as India, Malaysia or Israel. Such a system assigns an official religious group identity to citizens and thereby requires them to have matters such as marriage, divorce or inheritance adjudicated under the relevant religious courts empowered to rule on them (including Islamic and Christian ones). It is occasionally possible to appeal successfully against such rulings to the civil courts but it is a costly business unavailable to many. (See Martha Nussbaum, ”˜Religion and Women’s Equality: The Case of India’, in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies, Princeton, 2000, 335-402.) In my view such systems unacceptably infringe the civil liberties of citizens, although for political reasons it is not possible simply to legislate them away. Much of the criticism of Archbishop Williams (including Lord Carey’s article in The Sunday Telegraph, 10 February) seems to have been directed at this sort of arrangement, but it is not what he suggested.

Nor did he give the remotest succour to the idea that Islamic penal law might be countenanced in the UK, and it is fanciful to suggest that it ever could be. However, it is obviously understandable that those who live in, or who have suffered under or fled from, or who campaign against, officially Islamic states, almost all of which are dreadfully oppressive, would be alarmed at any suggestion of ”˜recognising Sharia law’ in the UK. The Archbishop may have given a flattering portrait of what ”˜Sharia law’ means in practice, but nothing at all in what he actually said justified such an interpretation.

What he actually referred to was not ”˜parallel jurisdictions’ but ”˜supplementary jurisdictions’. The model he seemed to be pointing towards (with regrettable imprecision, we now see) is something like a system of private arbitration, available to those who consent to use it, and made accountable by being accorded some sort of public recognition.

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The concrete steps leading from Ahmed Muhammad Sayyid’s first-floor apartment sag in the middle, worn down over time, like Sayyid himself. Once, Sayyid had a decent job and a chance to marry. But his fiancée’s family canceled the engagement because after two years, he could not raise enough money to buy an apartment and furniture.

Sayyid spun into depression and lost nearly 40 pounds. For months, he sat at home and focused on one thing: reading the Koran. Now, at 28, with a diploma in tourism, he is living with his mother and working as a driver for less than $100 a month. With each of life’s disappointments and indignities, Sayyid has drawn religion closer.

Here in Egypt and across the Middle East, many young people are being forced to put off marriage, the gateway to independence, sexual activity and societal respect. Stymied by the government’s failure to provide adequate schooling and thwarted by an economy without jobs to match their abilities or aspirations, they are stuck in limbo between youth and adulthood.

“I can’t get a job, I have no money, I can’t get married, what can I say?” Sayyid said one day after becoming so overwhelmed that he refused to go to work, or to go home, and spent the day hiding at a friend’s apartment.

In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them.

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LP: Here is a robust question. “Must we accommodate Islam or not, as Christians?”

RW: Must we accommodate Islam or not as Christians? Must I love my Muslim neighbour? Yes, without qualification or hesitation. Must I pretend to my Muslim neighbour that I don’t believe my own faith? No, without hesitation or qualification. Must I as a citizen in a plural society work for ways of living constructively, rather than tensely or suspiciously with my Muslim neighbour? Yes, without qualification or hesitation.

LP: This is, again, a question on a premise but it might be interesting to know whether you agree the premise. “Why are Muslims so scared to debate and question sharia law?”

AB: Well, I can’t speak for Muslims. There are quite a lot of them in the world and I’m not one of them. But I think that precisely because of the convergence of faith and custom in so many contexts, the way in which people construct and pin down their identities becomes very much allied to these issues about how disputes are resolved and what protocols are observed. And I think therefore there is an understandable sense, often confused and I would say misguided, that touching any bit of the cultural complex, undermines your whole identity. That has to do with the perceived political and social insecurity of many Muslim communities in our world. And I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the paradox is that from the Western perspective we frequently see the Muslim world as powerful, aggressive, coherent and threatening. From the other side of the world, the Muslim world, or a great deal of it sees us as powerful, coherent and threatening in very much the same way. Now, when those are the perceptions, you don’t have a very fertile ground for critical, relaxed, long-term discussions of some legal and cultural issues, and I think that’s a question that can’t really be answered without looking at those larger, global, political questions.

Take the time to go through it all.

Cairo’s highest civil court on Saturday ruled that 12 Christians who had converted to Islam could return to their original church, ending a bitter yearlong battle over identity and minority rights.

It was the second time in recent months that a court has upheld the rights of religious minorities, in a country that is 90 percent Muslim and where the distinction between civil law and religious principles is increasingly blurred.

The case involved Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam to obtain a divorce. The Coptic Orthodox Church does not allow dissolving a marriage. Islamic law, however, allows men to end a marriage easily.

For a time, Christians who converted in order to divorce were allowed by the courts to formally return to their original faith. But in recent years, as a more conservative sentiment has spread throughout the country and the government, the courts have not allowed converts to return to Christianity.

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It would be an understatement to say that there has been much heated debate since the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments regarding Sharia law, and the extent to which the adoption of some aspects of it in the UK seem, in his words, to be “unavoidable”. The media coverage has focused on what the Archbishop himself called “the darker side of Sharia” such as beheadings, amputations and the secondary role of women. But is this what Sharia really means and how unacceptable is it to suggest that it should have the same rights as other religious legal systems already recognised by UK law? A report by Kevin Bocquet was followed by a live discussion between the Rt Rev John Goddard, the Bishop of Burnley, the Rev Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney, and the religious commentator and broadcaster, Paul Vallely of the Independent, with reaction from Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone.

Listen to it all (over 24 minutes).

This unbelievable headline caught my eye immediately. Archbishop: Adoption of Sharia Law in U.K. is ‘Unavoidable’

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has suggested that it “seems unavoidable” that elements of Islamic law be accepted into the British legal system.
I suggest a better headline would have been: “Archbishop of Canterbury Loses His Mind.” Why in the world would the leader of the Church of England advocate for the imposition of Islamic law in Britain?

So profound a misunderstanding of the proud English and British heritage from the leader of the Church of England it is incomprehensible. Ironically, his comments demonstrate either ignorance of or hostility toward the historic commitment of the British people to freedom and self-determination. The first nation to emerge from the political chaos of the Middle Ages, the defiant victor over the militarily superior Spanish Armada in the 16th century, the last bastion in Europe against the forces of fascism in the century past, the people of the United Kingdom surrender their autonomy to no foreign power, secular or religious. Surrender is precisely what the Archbishop now says is “unavoidable.”

Most astonishing, these comments by the Archbishop disavow the most significant underlying values which have defined British history….

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In an interview on Radio 4 last Thursday, Rowan Williams said that the introduction of parts of Islamic law here would help to maintain social cohesion and seems unavoidable. Sharia courts exist already, he pointed out. We should “face up to the fact” that some British citizens do not relate to the British legal system, he said, and that Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

What he went on to say was more astonishing. He explained to the interviewer, in his gentle, wordy way, that a lot of what is written on this confusing subject suggests “the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody”. He went on: “That principle is an important pillar of our social identity as a western liberal democracy.” How true.

However, he continued: “It’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society, and the law needs to take some account of that.”

Stuff like this is bad for the blood pressure, but I listened on. “An approach to law which simply said there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said . . . I think that’s a bit of a danger.”

What danger? And to whom? The danger, surely, is rather the archbishop and those who think like him, who seem unwilling to hold fast that which is good. What is good and best and essential about our society ? it isn’t merely a matter of “social identity” ? is the principle of equality before the law. That principle and its practice have made this country the outstandingly just and tolerant state it is; it is one of the last remaining forces for unity as well.

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The response to the Archbishop tell us much more about our society, media, politicians and (even more sadly) our church than it does about him and what he said. His main failing ”“ and the costs of it are now enormous – amounts to an almost lethal combination of naivety in relation to the soundbite that would be taken from interview and opacity in relation to the lecture. The response is marked by prejudice (including against him ”“ the names of those calling for his resignation are no surprise to those who have followed certain conservative evangelical reactions to him since his appointment, despite the fact that his central argument is one with which they should have much sympathy), ignorance and misrepresentation. And yet, when such a storm results one has to ask why it has happened and its spiritual significance. The Archbishop has clearly touched a very raw nerve as did the Bishop of Rochester a few weeks ago. Interestingly, both of them made a very similar tactical error in relation to how to raise important issues through the media. The comment of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his interview referring to Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s article could now be applied to his own references to sharia ”“ “I think the phrase, because it echoed of the Northern Irish situation ”“ places where the police couldn’t go ”“ that was what it triggered in many peoples’ minds. I don’t think that was at all what was intended”. As with that earlier article from a different perspective, this latest incident is perhaps initially most revealing in relation to our attitudes to Islam.

However, like the lecture, the revelation perhaps also goes deeper. What we have witnessed in the last few days is not only the inability of our secular society (especially in and through the media) to think seriously about an important issue. We have also been shown our inability to understand the importance of religious commitments and communities in and for our public life. Deeper still we have had demonstrated our refusal to consider that we need God even for the apparently simple task of understanding ourselves as a society and discerning how we can live together in our diversity of cultures and faiths. Rather than acknowledging this failure to comprehend and seeking to listen, to understand, to dialogue and to learn, our response ”“ from the Prime Minister down – has been one of immediate distortion, disbelief, dismissal and disdain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It therefore looks like our common off-the-shelf understandings of ourselves are indeed ”˜not adequate to deal with the realities of complex societies’. In fact, what the reactions of the last few days have clearly revealed is that our public life and our ability to communicate and reason together as a society faces much more widespread, deep-rooted, pressing and serious challenges than the narrow question of how best to respond to sharia law. It is these challenges, starkly revealed by the ill-informed hysteria of recent days, that, along with the issues the Archbishop’s lecture has so accurately highlighted, we urgently need to address through reasoned and civil public discussion.

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Read it carefully and read it all.

There has been a mixed reaction to Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams’ comments about adopting Sharia law in Britain from politicians, spiritual and cultural figures in the United Kingdom.

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English law is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, in particular, our notions of human freedoms derive from that tradition. In my view, it would be simply impossible to introduce a tradition, like Sharia, into this corpus without fundamentally affecting its integrity.

The Sharia is not a generalised collection of dispositions. It is articulated in highly concrete codes called fiqh. It would have to be one or the other, or all, of these which would have to be recognised. All of these schools would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence. This is not to mention the relation of freedom to belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy.

We should learn from the debate on this question which recently took place in Canada. Here it was mainly Muslim women’s group that succeeded in preventing the application of Islamic law in matrimonial matters. The importance of a single law for all was strongly re-affirmed.

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Senior religious leaders attack multiculturalism and sharia law today, warning that they are “disastrous”, socially divisive and are destroying Britain’s culture and values.

Lord Carey and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor rebut the call of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, for Islamic law to be recognised in Britain.

Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, said: “His acceptance of some Muslim laws within British law would be disastrous for the nation. He has overstated the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes.

“His conclusion that Britain will eventually have to concede some place in law for aspects of sharia is a view I cannot share.

“There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land which have been so painfully honed by the struggle for democracy and human rights.”

Read it all and follow all the links and read them also.

While I am going to post some stories on the Rowan Williams-Sharia Law flap, I am seeking to avoid letting it become the entire focus of the blog. A news search right now turns up over 1000 stories, for example, and a look at the givesover 3200 entires.

“What a burkha” declared the Sun newspaper, alongside a picture of a head-covered figure making a rude gesture. To judge by the tone of the British press (and not only the tabloid press), the Archbishop””who is also the leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, numbering 80m people””might have been advocating the mandatory covering of every female British head, plus the instant introduction of amputation, whipping and stoning for the most trivial misdemeanours.

In fact, of course, he said nothing of the kind. But what he did advocate was not uncontroversial: he suggested there could be a “plural jurisdiction” in which Muslims could freely decide whether disputes (in which only co-religionists were involved) were resolved in secular courts or by Islamic institutions which offer an alternative forum for arbitration.

As long as the decision to seek, and abide by, a form of arbitration is freely made, it is hard to see how any secular legal system could actually ban people from using it. But the extent to which state law can recognise and “use” decisions made by such private arbitration services is a difficult grey area. And perhaps””to interpret the Archbishop charitably””he was merely pointing out that such difficulties are bound to grow.

In any case, for those who are already making political capital by playing on people’s fears of multi-culturalism, the speech by the Archbishop was a gift And for some of the people who are concerned to defend the cultural rights of Muslims, both the speech and the reaction it prompted were an embarrassment, to put it mildly.

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What did the Archbishop say?

Dr Williams said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of Sharia would be adopted in Britain. He urged that the law do more to accommodate the religious convictions and practices of other faith groups .

Why have his comments prompted such a furore?

Sharia is controversial in the West because ”“ as the Archbishop put it ”“ it calls up “all the darkest images of Islam”. He added: “What most people think they know of Sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishments,” such as stoning, flogging and amputation.

Timing is another factor: his comments come during heightened tensions over fundamentalist Islam’s link with terrorism, along with growing concern that English law, influenced by political correctness, is bending over to favour or accommodate minority ethnic beliefs, practices and sensitivities in a way that it would not for mainstream Christian ones.

Another reason is that Dr Williams, a highly erudite man, expresses his thoughts in nuanced and complex language that is not easily accessible and open to widespread misunderstanding. Many commentators are unclear exactly what he said, and even those who attended his lecture agreed that they would have to go away to digest its contents.

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BBC: And in your situation you see the reality of what Sharia law can be.

BK: We have experienced it. We know it and in the last nine years full blown Sharia law has been introduced in at least 11 states in Northern Nigeria, and what the church are experiencing in these states is, to say the least, unbearable.

BBC: How surprised are you that a Christian Archbishop should have suggested, in some circumstances, that Sharia might be an appropriate part of the legal system in a country like Britain?

BK. I am shocked. I am disappointed. I am in total disbelief. Because my hope is that when he, Archbishop of Canterbury, comes to Nigeria for example, and he comes to visit us, we will take him to our leaders, some of whom are Muslims and some of whom are Christians, and he can then speak on our behalf where we are not having a fair share. Can we now look up to him as a man who can speak on our behalf? You all know about the cutting of hands in Zamfara State. You remember the case of the woman in Kaduna State who was going to be stoned to death. All of those kinds of things are what we now are saying that we must examine carefully the implementation of Sharia and we are putting our discussions across with our own Muslim friends around here.

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As I say, for the moment there is nothing at all “unavoidable” about the institution of Sharia law in Britain. All that is necessary to countermand it is a little self-assertion on the part of the British people. Surely the instinct for self-preservation has not been totally eradicated in Britain by the enervating imperatives of political correctness””do I end that sentence with a period or a question mark? It is a mark of how serious things have become come that I am no longer certain. The triumph of Islam in Britain is eminently avoidable. But the triumph of civilizational Quislings like Rowan Williams might just change that.

Read the whole piece.

The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.

The three men were invited as part of a weeklong conference on terrorism organized by cadets at the academy’s Colorado Springs campus under the auspices of the political science department.

The three will be paid a total of $13,000 for their appearance, some of it from private donors, said Maj. Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy.

The three were invited because “they offered a unique perspective from inside terrorism,” Major Ashworth said. The conference is to result in a report on methods to combat terrorism that will be sent to the Pentagon, members of Congress and other influential officials, he added.

Members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group suing the federal government to combat what it calls creeping evangelism in the armed forces, said it was typical of the Air Force Academy to invite born-again Christians to address cadets on terrorism rather than experts who could teach students about the Middle East.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury provoked a chorus of criticism yesterday by predicting that it was “unavoidable” that elements of Islamic sharia law would be introduced in Britain.

Christian and secular groups joined senior politicians to condemn Rowan Williams’ view that there was a place for a “constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law” over such issues as marriage.

Dr Williams told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One: “It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law, so it is not as if we are bringing in an alien and rival system. We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances.”

He added: “There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.”

Read it all and there are scores of links to other coverage here.

The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK seems “unavoidable”.
Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting some aspects of Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

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From the burning of the Oxford Martyrs in 1555 to the revolutionary Oxford Movement in 1833, the university city has long been the scene of religious conflict.

But a very modern battle of faiths is brewing amid the ancient dreaming spires, which could result in the Islamic call to prayer being broadcast over one of the nation’s earliest and most important seats of Christian theology.

Senior members of the Oxford Central Mosque are seeking permission to broadcast a two-minute Adhan, the traditional Muslim call to prayer, through loud speakers in the minaret three times a day.

However, rather than being welcomed as a sign of multi-culturalism, the proposal has outraged many East Oxford locals.

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The Rev Charlie Cleverly, Rector of St Aldate’s Church, said that the call to prayer could drive people away from areas adjacent to the Oxford Central mosque, which hopes to bring in the three-daily azan.

He said: “I feel [the call to prayer] is un-English and very different from a bell.

“It may force people to move out and encourage Muslim families to move in. “I hope and pray the imam will hear the strength of feeling gently and lovingly and change his mind.”

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Clergy on the ground acknowledge that parallel communities exist, but they insist that problems arise from social as much as religious factors, and that many bridges have been built since the riots in places such as Burnley and Bradford in 2001.

The Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Revd John Goddard, insisted on Monday: “There are no ”˜no-go’ areas in Burnley, or in East Lancashire as a whole. There are areas of separation where there is what we would describe as parallel lives. This can lead to misunderstandings, not least fostered by groups such as the BNP. But there are superb good stories to be told, not least the work of the churches across all boundaries . . . a real attitude of presence and engagement.

“We remain in all areas. We serve the whole community through our schools. One of the things we recognise is that you have to learn to be church in rather a different way when you are a minority faith.”

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The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, faced calls for his resignation after his article in The Sunday Telegraph….

He said he was echoing concerns voiced by Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality Commission, and those in the 2001 Cantle Report on the race riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley.

“I deeply regret any hurt and do not wish to cause offence to anyone, let alone my Muslim friends, but unless we diagnose the malaise from which we all suffer we shall not be able to discover the remedy,” he said.

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One of Britain’s top Anglican bishops has infuriated Muslim leaders by claiming that Islamic extremism has turned parts of the nation into “no-go” areas for non-Muslims.

Writing in London’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper, the Pakistani-born bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, also warned of growing efforts to “impose an Islamic character” in some communities, including broadcasting the five-times-a-day call to prayer from mosques.

Islamic leaders have reacted angrily, including Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain’s inter-faith relations committee, who denounced the bishop’s remarks as “simple scaremongering.”

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Multiculturalism, globalism, and an emphasis on “inter-faith” (which is really inter-faithless because in this view Truth does not exist) are contributing to the decline of the West just as paganism, hedonism and greed undermined past empires. Rather than learn from their mistakes, the West thinks it can engage in such practices without consequence.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has expressed concern about the loss of “Britishness” and the failure to learn English and embrace the national heritage. But unless he does something to slow, even reverse Muslim immigration, Britain, as we’ve known it, will be lost and radical Islam will remake Britain in its own image.

As Bishop Nazir-Ali writes, “But none of this will be of any avail if Britain does not recover that vision of its destiny which made it great. That has to do with the Bible’s teaching that we have equal dignity and freedom because we are all made in G-d’s image.”

The segregationists didn’t believe that at one time in America and the Muslim segregationists in Britain don’t believe it now.

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