MAY 2015
May 3. Bana Gora, chief executive of the Muslim Women's Council,
announced plans to create the country's first mosque run by women, for women, in Bradford. She said:
"In the Prophet's time the mosque was the center of community life and learning and we hope to replicate that model including women-led congregational prayers for women. Through the consultation process we intend to work with diverse groups, opinions and organizations including the Council for Mosques to create the ethos and spirit of the mosques during the Prophet's time."
May 7. A record of 13 Muslim MPs (up from 8 in 2010) were
elected in the general elections in Britain. Eight of the Muslim MPs are women.
May 14. The BBC's Home Affairs Editor, Mark Easton, drew criticism after he
compared the British-born Islamist Anjem Choudary to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Tory MP Michael Ellis, a fellow member of the last home affairs select committee, said:
"The BBC seems obsessed with giving as much airtime as possible to hate preachers. To make a comparison between historic figures who campaigned for peaceful change and a hate preacher like Choudary is appalling, offensive and inflammatory."
Choudary himself rejected the BBC's comparisons:
"The comparisons with Mandela and Gandhi are false. They are kuffar [non-believers] going to hellfire whilst I am a Muslim. Alhamudililah [praise Allah]."
May 26. Abu Haleema, a radical preacher from London, who posted films online attacking British Armed Forces and vowing never to "submit" to democracy, was
banned from using social media to promote his views. The ban prompted complaints from his supporters about the suppression of free speech.
JUNE 2015
June 1. Karim Kazane, a 23-year-old Muslim man,
demanded that Zizzi, an Italian restaurant chain, pay him £5,000 (€7,000; $7,800) in compensation after he found a piece of pepperoni in a meal at their branch in Winchester. Kazane was halfway through a carne picante, advertised as containing beef and chicken, when he discovered the meat banned under Islam.
June 4. Mohammed Rehman, 24, from Reading and Sana Ahmed Khan, 23, from Wokingham, were
charged with preparing for acts of terrorism in the UK. Both are accused of buying chemicals to manufacture explosive devices and of researching and downloading instructions for carrying out an attack, including a copy of the Al-Qaeda magazine
Inspire containing an article titled, "How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."
June 9. Sara Khan, the head of the anti-radicalization group, Inspire,
told The
Guardian that British teachers are afraid to report suspected Islamist extremism among their students out of fear of being labelled "Islamophobic."
June 10. A 34-year-old Muslim businessman from Cardiff was the first person in the UK to be
prosecuted under forced marriage laws that entered into effect in June, 2014. The man was jailed for 16 years after admitting to making a 25-year-old woman marry him under duress. The man, who was already married, "systematically" raped his victim for months, threatened to go public with hidden camera footage of her in the shower unless she became his wife, and threatened to kill members of her family if she told anyone of the abuse.
June 11. A report
warned that Britain is facing an "unprecedented" threat from hundreds of battle-hardened jihadists who have been trained in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It warned that more Britons are now trained in terrorism than at any point in recent memory.
June 11. Alaa Abdullah Esayed, a 22-year-old female refugee from Iraq living in Kennington, South London, was
sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for tweeting messages that encouraged terrorism. Esayed posted more than 45,000 tweets in Arabic on an open account to her 8,240 followers between June 2013 and May 2014, with many tweets encouraging violent jihad.
June 12. Tamanna Begum, a Muslim woman living in Ilford, Essex,
lost a legal battle to wear an Islamic
jilbab, a head-to-toe gown, at a nursery because it posed a "tripping hazard" for children and staff. Begum filed a claim for discrimination because of her "ethnic or cultural background." Judge Daniel Serota upheld a previous ruling by the East London employment tribunal that the gown was "reasonably regarded as a tripping hazard."
June 13. Talha Asmal, a 17-year-old from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who ran away from home in April to join ISIS, is believed to have
become Britain's youngest suicide bomber when he blew himself up during an assault on an Iraqi oil refinery. Friends described Asmal as an "ordinary Yorkshire lad." That may be true in more ways than one: Dewsbury, a quaint former mill town, has been
linked to more than a dozen Islamic extremists, including Mohammad Sidique Khan, the organizer of the July 7, 2005 London bombings.
June 15. An anti-Sharia group called "One Law for All" issued a
statement calling on Britain's new government to abolish Islamic Sharia courts, which they described as "kangaroo courts that deliver highly discriminatory and second-rate forms of 'justice.'" The statement said:
"Though the 'Sharia courts' have been touted as people's right to religion, they are in fact, effective tools of the far-right Islamist movement whose main aim is to restrict and deny rights, particularly those of women and children.
"Opposing 'Sharia courts' is not racism or 'Islamophobic'; it is a defense of the rights of all citizens, irrespective of their beliefs and background to be governed by democratic means under the principle of one law for all. What amounts to racism is the idea that minorities can be denied rights enjoyed by others through the endorsement of religious based 'justice' systems which operate according to divine law that is by its very nature immune from state scrutiny."
June 19. A British judge
ruled that a terrorism suspect did not have to wear an electronic tracker because it violates his human rights. The suspect, a 39-year-old Somali-born Islamic preacher who is accused of radicalizing young British Muslims, said he thought that MI5 had placed a bomb inside the bracelet, and that wearing the monitoring device was making him "delusional." The judge, Mr. Justice Collins, ruled this amounted to a breach of Article 3 of the Human Rights Act, which is meant to prohibit torture.
June 24. It
emerged that police in Birmingham knew that Muslim sex grooming gangs were targeting children outside the city's schools but did not alert the public out of fears of being accused of "Islamophobia." A confidential report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed that police were worried about "community tensions" if the abuse from predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs was made public.