Breaking news – but it’s not good
from Voice for Justice UK:
During Ramadan, Waltham Forest and Newham Councils have given approval for 27 mosques to broadcast the Muslim daily call to prayer across the Boroughs by loudspeaker. While one can appreciate and indeed sympathise with the difficulties faced by Muslims in observing their fast during Ramadan, at the very least this will cause a noise pollution nuisance. But over and above that, it is surely wrong to broadcast the challenging message “there is no god except Allah” across areas of the UK which include large numbers of followers of other faiths, while calling upon listeners to “submit”.
Some background facts: According to the 2011 census, Christianity remains the largest religion in Newham, with 40% of residents – 123,119 – identifying as Christian, as against the 30% or so (60,000) who identify as Muslim. It is also home to a small but active Jewish community – with five synagogues –and 27 more ethnic communities, with a ‘plurality’ of faiths, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism etc. It is apparently seen as London’s ‘most religious borough’ .
There is a similar situation in Waltham Forest. With 15.1% of the population identifying as Muslim, the Borough has the fifth largest Muslim population in London. There is, however, a far larger proportion of residents (64%) who identify as Christian, and there are further significant numbers of Hindus, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists. So the majority of people who are being forced to listen to this message are non-Muslim.
But even if the population of both boroughs was 100% Muslim, this decision would be wrong.
Certainly, Muslims trying to observe Ramadan during lockdown will be faced with challenges – we are all faced with challenges. But in a Christian country this cannot justify allowing the public broadcast of a message that denies and challenges not just our belief, but our entire way of life.
‘There is no god except Allah…’
Let us remind readers that Christianity is the established religion of our land. The whole of our society, culture and laws, since before Magna Carta, has been founded on Christian values and belief. It has given us a democracy that is the envy of the world, and both individually and corporately we worship Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who, by His death on the Cross and resurrection, set us free from sin and death. Even given the mass immigration of recent years, this fact remains, with around 60% of the population self-identifying as Christian. Yet, in one fell swoop, the Islamic call to prayer denies that and challenges our heritage. ‘There is no god but Allah’ is a proclamation that denies the divinity of Christ, seeking to subordinate Him to Mohammed – called by Muslims the greatest of all prophets and seen as the mouthpiece of Allah, on whose behalf he demands total ‘submission’.
Public broadcast of the Islamic call to prayer should not be allowed. The proclamation is deeply offensive not just to Christians, but to all faiths, because it is an assertion of supremacy and dominance. It says that, whatever beliefs lie at the heart of other religions, the revelation to Muhammed is superior. It is a claim to territory.
And there in a nutshell we have it, because at heart Islam is a religion of territory and conquest – which does not accept co-existence with rival belief systems.
Whatever the challenges presented by lockdown, Muslims must not be permitted to use them as an opportunity to proclaim and assert dominance over our towns and open spaces. Over the last years, as a society we have increasingly suppressed Christianity, removing Christian symbols and crosses in order to accommodate interfaith relations and multiculturism – even the name of Christmas has been changed by some towns to ‘Winterval’! In so doing we have become complicit in the covert but relentless Islamisation of our land. If we value our heritage and freedoms, this must stop.
Please sign our petition to the Mayor of Newham, calling for the decision to allow public broadcast of the Muslim call to prayer to be rescinded with immediate effect.
Sign here: https://www.citizengo.org/en/signit/179619/view
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