This can be also interesting to our jewish friends as Israel has the same problem with identity crisis:
Dominic Lawson: Could a robust Christian response be the answer to Muslim extremism in Britain?
Published: 07 December 2007
Yesterday I met Hannah. Or rather, I met "Hannah". She feels in too much danger to reveal her real name to someone she does not know. She is under police protection and has had to move house more than 40 times, to escape detection. The people Hannah is trying to hide from are not drug dealers or gangsters of any sort, although they attacked one of her homes armed with knives and axes. The men who have threatened to kill her are respectable, educated people. They are, in fact, her own brothers. They say that they want to avenge their family's honour.
Hannah's father is a British imam, of Pakistani origin, who settled in this country more than 40 years ago – although, Hannah told me, he still speaks very little English. When she was 16 he told her that she was to travel to Pakistan in order to marry a man he had chosen. When I asked Hannah if this could be termed an arranged marriage she replied: "No; an arrangement can be rejected. This was a forced marriage."
Rather than go through with it, Hannah fled her home and was given refuge by one of her school teachers, a woman who happened to be a practicing Christian. Hannah eventually converted to Christianity, which, of course, made her not just a rebel but an apostate. Under the rigid interpretation of Sharia law favoured by her father this is an offence for which execution is the only appropriate punishment. One of her four brothers made it clear that he was prepared to carry out such a sentence.
I pointed out to Hannah, now 31, that while this might be appropriate behaviour according to her family, her brother's threat to kill her was itself a very serious offence under British law, for which he could be charged, prosecuted, and if found guilty, sent to prison for a long time.
"But I couldn't testify against any of them," said Hannah. "I couldn't do that to my family." She did not mean, I think, that she was too frightened. Though she seemed a shy and delicate person, it's obvious that one thing Hannah does not lack is courage. No, it is love for her family, despite everything, which makes her refuse to take up the legal remedies which the Bri-tish state offers in her defence.
Hannah was one of the guests at the inaugural meeting of Lapido Media, a new charity set up, in its own words, "to promote religious literacy". The guest of honour, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing at the event, was a man not only outstandingly literate in the language of religion, but someone who would understand more than most the traumas that Hannah has endured – and is still enduring.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali is the Bishop of Rochester, and thus a leading figure in the Church of England, one of the Lords Spiritual; but, as his name suggests, he is from a largely Muslim family background. Dr Nazir-Ali was received into the Anglican Church of Pakistan at the age of 20 and became the Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab at the age of 35, making him the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion.
As Dr Nazir-Ali told me on an earlier occasion: "This was a time – the late 1980s – when there was a great movement towards political Islamicisation in Pakistan. As Christians we had to say that there were certain penal laws, partly concerning the role of women in society, which we could not support."
The threats to Dr Nazir-Ali that resulted from this ideological conflict eventually became so unpleasant – especially as they were also directed at his children – that the young bishop left Pakistan, and settled in Britain.
What astounded Dr Nazir-Ali, when he regained his bearings, was that the dominant form of Islam in the UK that he recalled from his time here in the 1970s (when he was tutorial supervisor in theology at Cambridge University) – pietistic, Sufi-orientated – had, in little more than a decade, been completely supplanted by something much more militant and political: in fact, exactly the same form of the religion that had forced him out of Pakistan.
Dr Nazir-Ali claims that this had happened "because the British mosques had recruited people from fundamentalist backgrounds" – people like Hannah's father, as it happens.
Like Hannah, Dr Nazir-Ali cannot be described as anti-Islamic. As he pointed out to me, he has "a large number of Muslim friends and relatives with whom I get on very well and for which I am deeply thankful". His complaint is against what he terms "the chauvinist manifestations of Islam, a kind of ideology which affirms the will to power". He adds that he had been to Bosnia during the period in which Muslims were slaughtered in their thousands: "So I have seen such chauvinism in its Christian form."
Interestingly, Dr Nazir-Ali does not simply blame the Saudis, or other foreign governments who might have been funding militant Islam in the mosques of Great Britain, for the rise in Muslim chauvinism in this country. He blames the British people themselves, arguing that there has been a catastrophic collapse in Christian-based morality and spirituality in this country over the past 40 or so years and that this has created a "moral vacuum" in society as a whole, which has been increasingly filled – at least in the minds of impressionable youth – by fundamentalist Islam.
Here, as a leading figure in the Church of England, Dr Nazir-Ali is swimming in dangerous waters. Is it the British people who should be blamed for deserting, in their millions, the once-dominant Church of England? Or should not the Church of England look at its own performance and try to understand why it has lost such a vast proportion of its audience – at least as defined by regular churchgoing, rather than notional affiliation?
An astounding statistic in a recent Policy Exchange pamphlet, The Hijacking of British Islam, shows that while Muslims make up no more than 3 per cent of the British population, there are now more Muslims who attend a mosque regularly than there are regular attenders in the pews of the Established Church. Fundamentalist Islam can hardly take all the blame for that extraordinary reversal.
Dr Nazir-Ali is deeply critical of the way in which New Labour, supposedly packed with devout Christians, has indulged men such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi (a frequent guest of the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone), who preaches that apostates from Islam should be executed.
My own suspicion is that the warm embrace of British politicians can only reduce the credibility of Qaradawi among radical Muslim youth; for similar reasons it is hard to imagine that if there is to be a revival of Christianity in this country, that it could ever come from a Church whose leaders sit in Parliament.
Afterwards, I wished I'd asked Hannah what she thought of it all; but she must have slip-ped away.
d.lawson@ independent.co.uk
Interesting? Click here to explore further
It's seems that only religius ortodoxy not some kind of reformisms can be remedy for both invasion of Islam and its couse the leftist secularism cancer.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/dominic_lawson/article3231170.ece
Topic: U.K. : The Imam’s Daughter : On the Run (Read 3377 times)