In August 2004, Ul Haq was named in a feud which cost the lives of two people. On July 29, 2004, 35-year old Azmat Yaqub (pictured) was shot dead as he worked out at a gym. A fortnight before he was shot several times at the gymnasium in Sparkhill, Mr Yaqub had become a father. Earlier, on March 17, 2003, Mr Yaqub had been hit by gunshot in his shoulder, a victim of a drive-by shooting. Shaham Ali, a companion who had been with him, was shot in the head and died. In the March 2003 killing, six people were arrested, and two were charged with attempted murder. The murder charges were rejected by a court, but one of the two accused was sentenced to two years’ jail. 31-year-old Mohammed Sharafit Khan was found guilty of false imprisonment and assault. Two others were found guilty of false imprisonment.The Times of London Story Follows:
Khan had invited the secretary of Birmingham Central Mosque, Mr. Shockat Lal, to his home. There, the victim was kept captive and repeatedly beaten over a period of one and a half hours. The secretary had had an affair with a woman, and she had fallen pregnant. What incited the anger of young Muslims from the mosque was the fact that the woman was Riyadh ul-Haq's wife. As she was Ul Haq's second wife, the marriage was not legal. Ul Haq had taken offense, and had sacked Shockat Lal. Others who supported the secretary were either expelled from the mosque or ostracized. In March 2003, Ul Haq was arrested from the home of his father, Mohammed Gora Pirbhai, who was an imam at a mosque in Leicester. Ul Haq was questioned about the drive-by murder, but received no charges. The two men who had died were friends of Shockat Lal.
Ul Haq's arguments that women are inferior to men still appear on the website of Birmingham Central Mosque. The Mosque website also has articles extolling the virtues of Deoband and also the extremist missionary group Tablighi Jamaat. The shoe bomber Richard Reid, the American Taliban John Walker Lindh, and members of the ISI have links with this group. Two of the 7/7 bombers attended a Tablighi Jamaat mosque in Dewsbury. Dr. Mohammed Naseem has been the chairman of the mosque for 32 years, and he claims to be a "moderate." Naseem, who was Riyadh Ul Haq's boss for a dozen years, is convinced he is being targeted for MI5 surveillance.
Three weeks after the 7/7 bombings, Naseem tried to claim that the four bombers were innocent, despite DNA evidence. Speaking of 7/7, he called Tony Blair a “liar” and an “unreliable witness.” He has publicly questioned the existence of al Qaeda. Naseem runs the Islamic Party of Britain and has said that homosexuals should be executed. Naseem is a major funder to the "Respect" party, whose only MP is George Galloway. After the atrocities of 9/11, Naseem had said that "we are not convinced that those people who perpetrated these actions were actually Muslims."
In January 2006, Britain's most senior civil servant was forced to withdraw an invitation which had been extended to Riyadh Ul Haq. The government had invited him to speak at a function marking the end of Eid ul-Fitr (the end of Ramadan) later that year. The decision was made after people had complained.
Riyadh Ul Haq is opposed to Muslims forming friendships with non-Muslims, whom he refers to dismissively as "kuffaar," claiming that the kuffaar exert an "evil influence." The Times quotes from one of his sermons: "We are in a very dangerous position here. We live amongst the kuffar, we work with them, we associate with them, we mix with them and we begin to pick up their habits."
The Mail quotes him as saying: "The Koran teaches Muslims not to follow in the footsteps of the Jews and the Christians, yet of our own choice we decide to live, act, work, behave, enjoy and play just like the kuffar...Allah has warned us in the Koran, do not befriend the kuffaar. The Jews and Christians will never be content with you until you follow their way."
Ul Haq praises the Taliban, as they share the same ideology, and he is contemptuous of Christians, Jews and Hindus. He openly and frequently ridicules "moderate" Muslims as evidenced in a sermon against "Jewish Fundamentalism." As they are classed as traitors by Ul Haq and his ilk, some moderate Muslims are understandably outraged by this aspect of Deobandi thinking.
Ul Haq also praises armed Jihad. He said in July 2001: "And no one dare utter the 'J' word. The 'J' word has become taboo. The 'J' word can never be mentioned and if someone mentions it, even Muslims look at one another. So much is happening and yet we are expected to remain silent."
On November 11, 2003, Ul Haq's "guru", Yusuf Motala, was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000 at Heathrow airport for seven hours, when he was preparing to fly to Mecca and Medina. His supporters were outraged. One of these, a graduate of the Bury Darul Uloom, said: "More than 75% of the English speaking Imams in the U.K. are graduates from the Darul Ulooms. (An) attack on Shaykh Yusuf Motala is an attack on the entire Muslim community." The graduate claimed that the Deobandi seminaries provided imams for the prison service and for hospitals, and that the Bury Darul Uloom is linked to the University of Preston.
Yusuf Motala was sent to Britain by a leading figure in Tablighi Jamaat, Muhammad Zakaria Kandhlawi (1898 – 1982). This man was a famous Deobandi scholar whose father had been renowned for his knowledge of the Hadiths (traditions of the prophet). Zakaria himself was a teacher of Hadiths. Zakaria urged Motala to go to Britain to "light the candle of Islam in a land of darkness." Despite being widely praised as a scholar, there are critics of Zakaria who claim that he actually fabricated many stories which he passed off as "authentic" Hadiths. When Motala founded the Darul Uloom in Bury in 1975, he did so with funding from Saudi Arabia.
The Times' reporting on the Deobandi movement in Britain is not before its time. Deobandi ideas have led to the Taliban, and if the governing Labour party is serious in its attempts to defuse radicalism, it should have acted far sooner to quell Deobandi activities. Other sermons from Riyadh ul-Haq, which the Times has reproduced, are: "The Globalized Suffering of the Muslims", "On Our Responsibilities as Muslims" and "Imitating the Disbelievers".
More info can be found on the Family Security Matters website."
Hardline takeover of British mosques
Almost half of Britain’s mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to “shed blood” for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.
Riyadh ul Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain. The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, according to a police report seen by The Times.
The Times investigation casts serious doubts on government statements that foreign preachers are to blame for spreading the creed of radical Islam in Britain’s mosques and its policy of enouraging the recruitment of more “home-grown” preachers.
Mr ul Haq, 36, was educated and trained at an Islamic seminary in Britain and is part of a new generation of British imams who share a similar radical agenda. He heaps scorn on any Muslims who say they are “proud to be British” and argues that friendship with a Jew or a Christian makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion”.
Seventeen of Britain’s 26 Islamic seminaries are run by Deobandis and they produce 80 per cent of home-trained Muslim clerics. Many had their studies funded by local education authority grants. The sect, which has significant representation on the Muslim Council of Britain, is at its strongest in the towns and cities of the Midlands and northern England.
Figures supplied to The Times by the Lancashire Council of Mosques reveal that 59 of the 75 mosques in five towns – Blackburn, Bolton, Preston, Oldham and Burnley – are Deobandi-run.
It is not suggested that all British Muslims who worship at Deobandi mosques subscribe to the isolationist message preached by Mr ul Haq, and he himself suggests Muslims should only “shed blood” overseas.
But while some Deobandi preachers have a more cohesive approach to interfaith relations, Islamic theologians say that such bridge-building efforts do not represent mainstream Deobandi thinking in Britain.
The Times has gained access to numerous talks and sermons delivered in recent years by Mr ul Haq and other graduates of Britain’s most influential Deobandi seminary near Bury, Greater Manchester.
Intended for a Muslim-only audience, they reveal a deep-rooted hatred of Western society, admiration for the Taleban and a passionate zeal for martyrdom “in the way of Allah”.
The seminary outlaws art, television, music and chess, demands “entire concealment” for women and views football as “a cancer that has infected our youth”.
Mahmood Chandia, a Bury graduate who is now a university lecturer, claims in one sermon that music is a way in which Jews spread “the Satanic web” to corrupt young Muslims.
“Nearly every university in England has a department which is called the music department, and in others, where the Satanic influence is more, they call it the Royal College of Music,” he says.
Another former Bury student, Bradford-based Sheikh Ahmed Ali, hails the 9/11 attacks on America because they acted as a wake-up call to young Muslims. This, he says, taught them that they will “never be accepted” in Britain and has led them to “return to Islam: sisters are wearing hijab . . . the lion is waking up”.
Mr ul Haq, the most high-profile of the new generation of Deobandis, runs an Islamic academy in Leicester and is the former imam at the Birmingham Central Mosque. Revered by many young Muslims, he draws on his extensive knowledge of the Koran and the life and sayings of the prophet Muhammed to justify his hostility to the kuffar, or non-Muslims.
One sermon warns believers to protect their faith by distancing themselves from the “evil influence” of their non-Muslim British neighbours.
“We are in a very dangerous position here. We live amongst the kuffar, we work with them, we associate with them, we mix with them and we begin to pick up their habits.”
In another talk, delivered a few weeks before 9/11, he praises Muslims who have gained martyrdom in battle and laments that today “no one dare utter the J word”. “The J word has become taboo . .. The J word is jihad in the way of Allah.”
The Times has made repeated attempts to get Mr ul Haq to comment on the content of his sermons. However, he declined to respond.
A commentator on religious radicalism in Pakistan, where Deobandis wield significant political influence, told The Times that “blind ignorance” on the part of the Government in Britain had allowed the Deobandis to become the dominant voice of Islam in Britain’s mosques.
Khaled Ahmed said: “The UK has been ruined by the puritanism of the Deobandis. You’ve allowed the takeover of the mosques. You can’t run multiculturalism like that, because that’s a way of destroying yourself. In Britain, the Deobandi message has become even more extreme than it is in Pakistan. It’s mind-boggling.”
In some mosques the sect has wrested control from followers of the more moderate majority, the Barelwi movement.
A spokesman for the Department for Communities said: “We have a detailed strategy to ensure imams properly represent and connect with mainstream moderate opinion and promote shared values like tolerance and respect for the rule of law. We have never said the challenge from extremism is simply restricted to those coming from overseas.”
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