Megamosque sect split over plans

Expansive plans for a so-called ‘megamosque’ in Newham, East London known locally as the London ‘markaz’ or headquarters of the huge worldwide Islamic sect Tablighi Jama’at are being opposed – by the sect’s own HQ in Delhi.

Ambitious UK Muslims have ear-marked a large plot, formerly occupied by a sulphuric acid plant, next to the 2012 Olympic village as the site for a 12,000-capacity mosque.
But it is emerging that they also want it for a training centre (markaz) and congregation ground (ijtimah) where TJ members from all over Europe could meet to be commissioned and prepared to spread out to preach, as happens in Delhi, Raiwind in Pakistan and Dhakka.

The UK group has been partly funded until recently by a millionaire developer, Suhail Subarland of Crossier Properties, to make their case through a PR company to government.

But the planners have now been accused of ‘over-enthusiasm’ by leaders of the sect in Delhi, indicating a split with the UK’s Pakistani leadership.

Professor S Suhaib Hassan, of Aligarh University told Lapido Media during a conversation at the movement’s historic centre or markaz in Nizamuddin in Delhi:  ‘Personally, for me, they should construct a mosque according to the need of that area.

‘But whosoever says this is a markaz should never tell it like this.  Maulana Sa’ad [the amir or world leader of TJ] does not agree with this idea, so whosoever says it is a markaz you may freely tell: “I have been to Nizamuddin and there is no markaz.”

‘This is simply the idea of some enthusiastic people that this is a markaz.  These are not sincere people who name it a markaz.  It should be named a masjid [mosque] and that’s all.’

The revelation offers a glimpse of down-to-earth contested reality in a situation that has threatened to get out of hand in the polyglot East End of London.

Sorbonne-trained Professor Hassan’s comments have salience since he said he was speaking for Maulana Saad, the charismatic great-grandson of TJ founder Maulana Muhammad Ilyas.

Saad oversees the prestigious moral heart of the movement in Delhi’s Muslim quarter, Nizamuddin, where Ilyas began work in 1927, building up what has become the world’s most successful Muslim missionary movement.

The comments reveal a split, and given London’s world dominance, a fear that authority has been wrested from the quietist Delhi HQ by more militant jihadi-influenced Pakistani and Bangladeshi activists.

Trustees of the Abbey Mills mosque – two Pakistanis, including a maulvi, and a Bangladeshi - met local MP Lyn Brown in Parliament on earlier in the year, with members of the local Transform Newham interdenominational group, as part of a public relations exercise by PR firm Indigo.

One Pakistani source who was present said the trustees conceded, when challenged, that the huge site was intended not just to be a mosque big enough for the obligatory Friday prayers – or jamaa - but also a markaz or regional centre, and of adequate size for an ijtimah, or annual congregation of all the faithful.

He said:  ‘The international pattern is for the markaz to determine the location of the annual regional assembly, or ijtimah, which would mean tens of thousands of European Muslims converging on the site every year for a three-day camp, followed by preaching outings in smaller groups around the city.’

The TJ ijtimah in Raiwind attracts 1.5 million people.  In Dhakka in Bangladesh, it is two million, second only to Mecca, and in Nizamuddin it is 500,000.

The £100million upgrade of Stratford Station as the main link for Euro-rail and the Olympics will be able to cater for up to 60,000 people each day, making the Abbey Mills site ideal for huge annual conventions.

The TJ’s methodology is focussed on prayer, stories of the saints and on building the Muslim character for the hereafter through training and preaching tours on which all the faithful are expected to devote several weeks or even months of each year. It is primarily a training methodology offering guidance for ordinary Muslims hungry for spiritual solace.

It avoids discussions on points of law and is criticized by other Muslim groups, especially the Wahhabis and Jamati-i-Islam for its avoidance of direct political engagement.

Others like Delhi-based Indian scholar Dr Yoginder Sikand, say it has little or no mitigating impact on poverty, and cannot address illiteracy.

It teaches a radical seclusion for women who are not allowed into the mosque – and are denied access to unrelated men.  For my interview with the Professor, I was required to sit behind a wall to avoid eye contact.

Concerns in Britain have mostly centred around security issues, with court evidence emerging last year of attendance at TJ meetings by key figures in terrorism cases, including Richard Reid the so-called shoe bomber and two of the 7/7 suicide bombers.

Christian People’s Alliance member Councillor Alan Craig is campaigning to ‘stop the mosque’ on the grounds that it is secretive, divisive and dangerous.

But local sources as well as scholars like Sikand say there is equally strong evidence to indicate that TJ, a pietist initiative with a backward-looking devotion to Muhammad and to the writings of certain Deobandi teachers, was infiltrated in the 1980s and 90s in Pakistan and Bangladesh by jihad recruiters, using the movement as a cover.  Gullible young Muslims in the movement do not know how to discern the difference.

It is a fact that:

• Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, head of Pakistan Intelligence (ISI) from 1992 – 93 was a Tablighi who recruited jihadis for the war in Kashmir.
• In 2005, NBC News obtained a secret government memo which stated that U.S. anti-terror officials believed radical extremists had been infiltrating this otherwise peaceful Islamic movement and are using Tablighi's U.S. organization ‘as cover... to network with other extremists in the U.S.’
• So-called American Taliban John Walker Lindh was radicalized at a Tablighi-affiliated mosque in California.
• Iyman Faris, who plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, posed as a Tablighi missionary to get into the U.S.

Said one Pakistani observer living in Newham: ‘We have to understand this is a loosely knit movement.  The problem is there are no rules for membership, no hierarchy or controls.  Anybody can get into it and hijack it.’

Lapido Media spoke to Stephen Timms, Treasury Minister and MP for neighbouring East Ham who said: ‘No Minister is likely to comment on reports about a little known organisation simply because it is interested in applying for permission to build a mosque in East London.’ 

Lyn Brown MP for West Ham also refused to respond to questions.