Saturday, October 15, 2011

Muslim-on-Muslim persecution

A minority Muslim sect says that it still faces persecution from Islamic extremists. The Ahmadiyya religion does not believe, as most Muslims do, that the prophet Mohammed was the last messenger of Allah – a theological difference so serious it led to Ahmadis declared as non-Muslim heretics in Pakistan. In 2010, 93 Ahmadi worshippers were slaughtered by Islamic terrorists while they prayed in mosques in Lahore. In Britain, Ahmadiyya Muslims, whose main mosque is in Morden, were being openly insulted and discriminated against by Islamic bigots who targeted their livelihoods and even their political candidates. The evidence pointed specifically to the Tooting Islamic Centre, where its imam, Suliman Gani, had invited hardline clerics in March 2010 to speak about the danger of the Ahmadiyya Muslim religion spreading in the face of mainstream. The clerics included Abdur Rehman Bawa from the Khatme Nabuwwat, a organization which claims to provide awareness about the Ahmadiyya religion. At the conference, Bawa urged worshippers not to do business with Ahmadis. Following that conference, Gani admitted he had pleaded with a halal meat shop owner not to sell his business to an Ahmadi because he believed that Ahmadis could not be trusted to sell legitimate halal meat. There were also leaflets entitled “Deception of the Qadiani” found in Tooting and an Ahmadi butcher won an employment tribunal case in which he was found to have been sacked because he would not renounce his religion.

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