17 December 2015

Mosque without minaret? Baroness Warsi spectacularly misses the point

.... “I want to see an Islam which sits comfortably within Britain and a Britain that sits more at ease with Islam,” says the Baroness. Well, so do we all. But it doesn’t begin with external matters of architecture, dress or what you eat. That is the blind leading the blind. What did Jesus say to the Pharisees and teachers of the law when they criticised his disciples for not washing their hands before they ate?

He talked of those who honour God with their lips while their hearts are far from Him. ‘But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men’ (Mt 15:9). It isn’t what goes into someone’s mouth that defiles them, but what comes out of their mouth.

It isn’t a minaret on a mosque that offends the English spiritual disposition, but the evil thoughts and vile sermons of too many imams in those mosques, not to mention the perpetual cosying up to the fons et origo of the Islamist ideology.

Why didn’t Baroness Warsi say much against Saudi-Salafism when she was a Foreign Office Minister? Too busy obsessing about the evils of Israel and the virtues of Palestinian statehood?

Forget the minarets: a “quintessential English” Islam urgently needs a robust Mohammedology for modernity (and the freedom to develop one without allegations of preaching ‘hate’, ‘Islamophobia’ or being summarily beheaded). [Archbishop Cranmer] Read more