What’s Really Going on With Islam, France and the West Right Now?
By: Clément Bourcart
Tags: Europe, Religion, Freedom, Society, Islam

A Personal Experience That Shook Me to the Core

I myself regularly attended lectures at the London Central Mosque, in Regent’s Park, over the course of a year.

This is one of the largest mosques in the country, right in the center of London, and their “Director General” happens to be a Saudi diplomat.

This individual himself was running the weekly lectures, and still is, as far as I’m aware.

There is a picture of him shaking hands with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on a visit, inside the building. This is an authority figure who is a representative of that community in this country.

Just to make the point for what will follow, that we are not talking about some “extreme”, “radical” isolated individual preaching in some run-down mosque in a non-English speaking area of Birmingham here.

The point is, during one of the lectures (after which I stopped attending, in utter shock), at Q&A time, this benign-looking elderly man got up to ask his question.

The question was, verbatim:

“I have heard we should kill apostates. What should we do?”

The man was straight-faced, and asked the question in this naive kind of way as kids do when asking a question to an adult, drinking in their every word, ready to act on the advice given.

The response of the Saudi diplomat, “Director General” of the London Central Mosque?

Again, verbatim:

“No, No. Just talk to them. If you talk to them, surely they will never leave Islam.”

Period.

Silence.

“Just talk to them” because surely, it will be so evident that they will stay in the fold of this religion and never want to leave it.

But what if they do (want to claim their right to use their own brains and make their own choices)?

The question was left open, unanswered.

To which no one, in a room of c50 people, raised an eyebrow or even responded to.

Simply recollecting this incident sends chills down my spine.

Yes, they will not even dare to leave because that would amount to social, if not physical, death for those people.

Which is often the case even when someone (especially a woman) remains in the faith, but simply dares to choose who to marry — and to marry outside of it.

[My fiancée and I are part of a group organized by Dr Hargey, who has been on a mission to unite communities by promoting marriages across cultural and religious lines, for the past decade. Which of course has cost him many death threats and the like. In this group, stories of women being chastised by their families are a dime and dozen. One was threatened to death by her own sister and mother on multiple occasions, calling her workplace pretending she had been kidnapped by “Dutch terrorists”, demanding her husband's conversion to Islam and name change and attempting to send her off to a religious “institution” abroad — I will let you imagine what would have happened to her had she accepted the offer.]

Being sat in one of the most (if not the most) prominent, “modern” mosques in the UK, in the heart of London, speaking directly with the representative of this very mosque who shook hands with the UK PM, and hearing someone ask about whether people should be killed for choosing different believes, to hear such a lackluster, ambiguous response and the complete lack of any sense of “something is going seriously wrong here” from anyone in the audience defies reason.

Defies all reason.

Paradoxically, the above was one of numerous incidents that eventually led to me to leave the faith.

And the same people will then have the nerve to talk about, or worse yet, demand freedom of belief? Tolerance? Respect?

Whilst at the very same time, neglecting all of these things to anyone who happens to have a mind of their own?

[When by the way, many would not even give these rights to Muslims who believe in slightly different variations of the religion. During one of those lectures, I witnessed a man point-blank denying access to the mosque to anyone who happened to hold Shia believes, as opposed to dominant Sunni creed…]

Can someone make sense of this hypocrisy and utter nonsense?