In London, a battle over a mega-mosque

That plan was sent back to the drawing board to be scaled down, but not before raising a furore of equal size and discomforting questions about the right of Britain’s Muslims to take up a public space commensurate with their growing numbers.

This summer on the website of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, more than 250,000 critics of the proposed mosque supported a petition initiated by a backer of the conservative British National Party. Some of them said a large mosque had no right to exist in such a prominent place in a Christian country.

When, around the same time, Karen Armstrong, a historian of religion, wrote an article in the liberal Guardian newspaper commenting favourably about the mosque, the paper’s website was deluged with complaints.

In Newham, the borough where the mosque would stand, Alan Craig, the leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance Party in the East End, started a one-man campaign against the mosque a year ago that has grown and gained national prominence.

He began by emphasising the size of the mosque. But now he focuses on its sponsor, Tablighi Jamaat, a worldwide evangelical Islamic group based in Pakistan with millions of followers that professes to encourage Muslims to be more loyal to their faith.

American and European law enforcement officials say Tablighi Jamaat’s simple message masks a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists. Two of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transit system in July 2005 had attended Tablighi Jamaat gatherings, British security officials said.

Tablighi Jamaat “is a separatist organisation,” Craig said in an interview in his living room where a picture of the crucifixion of Christ hung on a wall, a cross rested on a bookshelf, and a Bible lay on the coffee table. “They refer to us as kafir,” a term of contempt, he added. “That’s not what we need. We don’t want this mosque in East London. It will be disastrous.”

That Craig’s immediate neighbours include a Pakistani family on one side of his row house, and immigrants up and down the block, speaks to the changes in the East End, where South Asian Muslims are among the latest wave of immigrants.

The area has welcomed newcomers to London over the ages, starting with the French Huguenots, including Jews in the 19th century. Now nearly 30 mosques, most of them small, are crowded during Friday Prayer.

The 2001 census shows 34.2 percent of the Newham borough population is white. South Asians and blacks predominate. Christianity remains dominant at 46.8 percent and Muslims make up 24.3 percent.

The driving force behind the plan to build a grander mosque has been Abdul Khaliq Mian, 55, a British businessman born in Pakistan and a longtime follower of Tablighi Jamaat.

In an interview, Mian explained how in 1996 he helped raise £1.6 million, or about $2.9 million at the time, from the Tablighi community to buy an abandoned lot that was once the site of a sulfuric acid plant. Mian, who came to Britain at age 11, said that in the late 1990s officials on the Newham Borough Council, which includes Muslims, encouraged Tablighi Jamaat to build a grand mosque befitting the scale of the land.

“I was told it was a very, very strategic site,” Mian said. “They said, ‘Get a planner and the best architect you can and build the biggest mosque you can.’”