Category Archives: Obscurantism

This is a guest post by Leyton Oriental

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We have all read about how moderate/liberal minded Muslims have been the target of assassinations in Pakistan and how some of them have been forced to flee conservative Islamic societies in order to stay alive. But here in the UK, the Muslim community is far more religiously conservative than many Muslim majority societies.

It is shocking but not surprising to learn that one of Britain’s leading moderate Muslim Imams is being hounded out of his job for expressing views which are unpalatable to the conservative Muslims.

There has been a concerted campaign by many Muslims to remove Usama Hasan from his post as Imam of Masjid al-Tawhid in Leyton, East London. The “charges” against him are:

• Seeking to reconcile Islam with the theory of evolution
• Claiming that the Hijab is not mandatory
• Acceptance of secularism in the practice of good governance

This is a cross-post by Robin Simcox

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Nothing ruins my day quite like coming into contact with that breed of especially stupid person who thinks that 9/11 was an ‘inside’ job. Walking around Broadway Market in east London this weekend, I saw a poster which reminded me that such people have a like-minded community with whom they can share their delusions.

The poster advertised the 9/11 ‘truth’ events taking place all over London this week, hosted by an organisation called Truth Rising, to coincide with the nine year anniversary of 9/11. So, if you are that way inclined, you can go to a ‘party’ where you dress up as your favourite neocon, watch ‘Loose Change’ (a fictional movie pretending to be a documentary that is a fave with conspiracy theorists) and then be entertained by spoken word ‘legend’, MC Angel, and someone who calls himself Planetman.

Watch the video, it is astonishing.

Warning: Social cohesion it is not. But don’t worry, no ‘black Muslim Puerto Rican types’ were physically hurt in the making of this video.

This is a take of it from gawker.com :

Both supporters and opponents of the “Ground Zero” “Mosque”—a proposed community center—held rallies in lower Manhattan today. Can you guess which side started chanting “no mosque here” at a black guy wandering through the crowd?

While you spent your Sunday trying to teach your cat to go to the bathroom on a human toilet, a group of brave, freedom-loving Americans gathered in New York City to express their extreme disapproval with the Park 51 project, an al-Qaeda plot to build a community center featuring a swimming pool and auditorium on the very site where a Burlington Coat Factory once stood.

Abu Faris has dismantled Naik’s spurious theology quite succinctly:

[Zakir Naik] is a past master of making false analogies. One of my favourites concerns his defence of state intolerance of non-Muslim faith communities in Muslim-majority countries. It runs like this:

(1) If you were running a school then you would not appoint a maths teacher who believed 2 + 2 = 5, because this is clearly not true.

(2) All other religions are false – that is, by false analogy, they are like the bad maths teacher who thinks and teaches that 2 + 2 = 5

(3) Only Islam is true – that is, by false analogy, it is like the good maths teacher who thinks and teaches the truth, that is that 2 + 2 = 4.

Christopher Hitchens on the pseudo-intellectual anti-science quackery of HRH Prince Charles:

A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own. And, as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”