Conversion of non-Muslim places of worship into mosques

Conversion of non-Muslim places of worship into mosques began during the life of Muhammad and continued during subsequent Islamic conquests and under the Muslim rule. As a result, numerous Hindu temples, churches, synagogues, the Parthenon and Zoroastrian temples became mosques. Wikipedia



April 2, 2007
Old Church Becomes Mosque in Uneasy Britain
By JANE PERLEZ
New York times

CLITHEROE, England — On a chilly night this winter, this pristine town in some of Britain’s most untouched countryside voted to allow a former Christian church to become a mosque.

The narrow vote by the municipal authorities marked the end of a bitter struggle by the tiny Muslim population to establish a place of worship, one that will put a mosque in an imposing stone Methodist church that had been used as a factory since its congregation dwindled away 40 years ago.

The battle underscored Britain’s unease with its Muslim minority, and particularly the infiltration of terrorist cells among the faithful, whose devotion has challenged an increasingly secular Britain’s sense of itself.

Britain may continue to regard itself as a Christian nation. But practicing Muslims are likely to outnumber church-attending Christians in several decades, according to a recent survey by Christian Research, a group that specializes in documenting the status of Christianity in Britain.

More conspicuous than ever in both the halls of power and in working-class neighborhoods, Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims, about 2.7 percent of the population, are at once alienated and increasingly assertive.

In Clitheroe, the tussle involved a passionate young professional of Pakistani descent coming up against the raw nerves of tradition-bound local residents.

“We’ve been trying to get a place of worship for 30 years,” said Sheraz Arshad, 31, the Muslim leader here, his voice rattling around the empty old Mount Zion Methodist Church that will house his mosque. “It’s fitting it is a church: it is visually symbolic, the coming together of religions.”

With a population of 14,500, a Norman castle and an Anglican church established in 1122, Clitheroe is tucked away in Lancashire County in the north. People here liked to think they represented a last barrier to the mosques that had become features in surrounding industrial towns. But Clitheroe had not bargained on the determination of Mr. Arshad, a project manager at British Aerospace. He is the British-born son of Mohamed Arshad, who came to Clitheroe from Rawalpindi in 1965 to work at the cement works on the town’s outskirts.

When his father died in 2000, leaving his efforts to establish a mosque for the approximately 300 Muslims unfulfilled, Mr. Arshad took up the challenge.

“I thought, why should I be treated any less well?” Mr. Arshad said. “One quarter of my salary goes in tax, too. I was driven to do the mosque.”

In all, Mr. Arshad and his father made eight applications for a mosque, and even proposed buying a modest terrace house on the edge of town to be used for worship. Mr. Arshad said he tried to buy land from the council but was rebuffed.

Often there was booing at council meetings, and, he said, cries of “Go home, Paki!”

The authorities’ official reasoning for the rejections was generally that a mosque would attract outsiders — a veiled reference to Muslims — to Clitheroe.

Letters to the local newspaper, The Clitheroe Advertiser and Times, warned that what had happened in Blackburn and Preston, two bigger nearby industrial towns with substantial Muslim populations, would happen to Clitheroe.

Mr. Arshad decided to get organized and demonstrate that he was a moderate Muslim who could take part in all the town’s affairs.

He formed an interfaith scout group — Beaver Scouts — that honored many religious occasions, including the Taoist and Jewish new years. He established the Medina Islamic Education Center as an interfaith group for adults, and persuaded the local council to allow the group to lead a key committee. He organized a series of lectures on global conflict that attracted important academics.

On Dec. 21, the night of the vote on the mosque, the council chambers overflowed with 150 people. The police were poised outside. The vote was 7 to 5 for the mosque; there was no violence.

“I went in resigned to the fact we would lose,” Mr. Arshad said. “In the end, it was very humbling.”

The church’s demarcation as a place of worship in the town’s planning records helped carry the day, said Geoffrey Jackson, chief executive of Trinity Partnership, a social welfare agency, and a Methodist who backed Mr. Arshad.

So did Mr. Arshad’s demeanor. “He’s a top lad, with a Lancashire accent, born and bred here, and educated at Clitheroe Grammar,” Mr. Jackson said.

But the fight is hardly over. Beneath the official vote lies a river of resentment among those who fear that the broader patterns in Britain will emerge here. In one sign of the tensions, some of the church’s windows have been smashed.

“There was so much opposition,” said Robert Kay, a hired driver. “The people who were for the mosque were those who were not going to end up with it on their doorstep.”

The Mount Zion Methodist Church became a factory for making scarves for export to the Middle East in the 1960s, when Christian church-going in Britain had already begun to decline.

Today, Britain has fewer than 500,000 practicing Methodists, and of its Christians, only about 6 percent are regulars at church, according to Peter Brierley, executive director of Christian Research. Though numbers for comparison are not known precisely, most agree that Britain’s Muslims are far more regular mosque attendants.

The symbolic encroachment of Islam at the pinnacles of British power is already clear. At Oxford University, town residents recently but unsuccessfully fought the building of a Center for Islamic Studies, and in the House of Lords the number of Muslim members has gone from none to seven during the decade of the Labor government.

In working-class neighborhoods, the differences are stark between white Britons and immigrant Muslim Asians, who began arriving in significant numbers from former British colonies in Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1970s. The whites are less likely to marry, and they bear more children out of wedlock, trends many Muslims, who put stock in intact families, find disturbing.

The high rate of alcohol consumption among whites sets the groups apart, too. In Blackburn and Preston, increasing numbers of neighborhoods have become exclusively Muslim, and the growing influence of the conservative Wahhabi school of Islam is more and more apparent among women who wear black robes and cover all but their eyes.

In Blackburn, the constituency of Jack Straw, the leader of the House of Commons, there are 30,000 Muslims among a population of 80,000. But in a telltale sign for the future, the number of children 10 years and younger is evenly divided between Christian and Muslim.

It is those demographics, and the visibility of Blackburn’s 40 mosques alongside the ancient Christian church spires, that frightened the mosque opponents in Clitheroe.

As Mr. Arshad makes plans to renovate the church, Clitheroe’s Christians are taking stock.

At St. Mary Magdalene Church, where the first stone was laid in the 12th century, the congregation has dropped to about 90 people on Sunday, and the average age of congregants is 75, said the Anglican vicar, Philip Dearden. Christenings are now rare, and he has only seven weddings booked for the year.

“Lancashire is the last place to see secularization in Britain,” Mr. Dearden, 64, said. “We’re seeing it now quite drastically. People don’t have a conscience about religion; they don’t come anymore.”

In the nearby town of Kendal, an Anglican vicar, Alan Billings, has written a book, “Secular Lives, Sacred Hearts: The Role of the Church in a Time of No Religion.”

He says the growing opposition to new mosques among the white population reflects an anxiety in Britain that has become more exposed since the London suicide bombings in July 2005.

“Often it’s expressed as low objections, more cars, more people,” said Mr. Billings, who is also a frequent contributor to the BBC’s religious programs. “But it is really a deeper anxiety about what is happening in society. It is the fear of what will happen to the culture and feel of Britain.”

At a Saturday gathering of about 50 believers, almost all of them white-haired, Mr. Billings warned that the church was under pressure. Islam could now be seen as an alternative to Christianity, he said.

On a recent Sunday, only one child turned up to Sunday school classes. The story books, paper and pencils lay unused as an elderly teacher tutored the 6-year-old boy in an otherwise empty room.

In contrast, Shamim Ahmed Miah, 26, a British-born mufti of Pakistani origin in Accrington, a town next to Clitheroe, teaches 30 Arabic and Koranic students, ages 5 to 15, in three sessions daily.

Mr. Miah coaxed 10 primary school students, seated at desks in a brightly lighted community center, to recite the Arabic alphabet. He handed out sheets of paper to each student for them to draw some letters. “Be gentle, this is an art,” Mr. Miah said.

Mr. Arshad is considering inviting Mr. Miah to be the imam in Clitheroe. “He’s progressive,” he said.

As for the new mosque, there will be no obvious changes to the church’s exterior, though the cross at the top will come down.

Women will be welcome to pray in the main prayer hall, “not in a cubby hole in the corner,” Mr. Arshad said.

“We don’t want a dome,” he said. “That looks pretty in Egypt and Turkey, but in a market town in England it looks like a big onion. There will be no external call to prayer. What matters is what goes on inside.”
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300 years Old Church in Turkey was Converted to Mosque with One Petition

Church converted into a Mosque - Formerly St. Marks Cathedral in England

1743 French Protestant Church converted to Mosque

Colosse, Turkey the Eastern Orthodox church was converted to a mosque in 1945

Belgium's dwindling churches to be converted into mosques

Christian Priest in Sex-Tape Horror

by Dom Phillips


In the small Brazilian city of Arapiraca, tucked away in the poor, conservative northeast corner of the country, a hidden-camera video showing an octogenarian priest having sex with a young altar boy is being hawked on the street. For $5 to $10, vendors here will sell you the video, downloading it directly into your cellphone via Bluetooth. The price depends on the quality and length of the footage. According to one street vendor, the most popular download is the “complete” version. Buyers, he says, are “almost everybody—not just the curious.”

Even as the Catholic Church reels from abuse accusations that go straight to the pope, the incidents in Arapiraca are developing into a full-blown disaster that will land it near the top of the Vatican’s growing stack of crises. The sex tape is part of a scandal enveloping three of the city’s most venerated priests, and its release has led to threats, blackmail allegations, and counterattacks from the local church. In a place like Brazil—a country obsessed with sex, religion, and overwrought soap operas—one would expect nothing less than the bizarre narrative currently unfolding.

Asked if he had ever abused an altar boy, the priest responded, “I can’t tell you this. I can only tell my confessor any sin of mine. I don’t need to admit or deny.”

The accusations, exposed on the TV show Conexão Repórter (Reporter Connection) last month, are deeply damaging. A reporter interviewed three altar boys who alleged years of abuse at the hands of three Catholic priests. With his face hidden, one of those altar boys, now identified as Fabiano Silva Ferreira, alleged that a priest named Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa has abused him for years. Police say Barbosa’s abuse began when Fabiano was 12.

“He was hugging me, stroking me, kissing me,” Fabiano said of Barbosa, who is now 83. He claimed that Barbosa told him, “I love you, I really like you… I want you forever,” and that the priest would attempt to grope him during Mass, warning him, “Don’t tell anybody… This is something between me and you.”

Fabiano is the boy who appears in the sex tape that is being trafficked through the streets of Arapiraca. On the tape, he performs a sex act on Monsignor Barbosa, whose face is clearly visible. The tape was secretly shot by another altar boy, Cícero Flávio Vieira Barbosa (no relation to the priest), who also alleges years of abuse at the hands of Monsignor Barbosa, also beginning when he was 12. Asked why he shot the film, Flávio said, “Because there has to be a good end to this story. I was already his victim. And it brought a lot of fear to do something… I wanted proof.”

Click here to find out more!

The case is front-page news in Brazil, and has sent shockwaves shuddering through what is still a very Catholic country. Meanwhile, incendiary commentary is spreading like wildfire across Brazil’s garrulous blogosphere. “This is the demon in the middle of the Church of Our Lord,” reads one blog comment about Barbosa, written in Portuguese.

“They are already condemned for being pastors of God and to do something like this is shameful and nauseating for us who are Catholics.”

When the interviewer on Reporter Connection asked Barbosa if, in his 58 years in the priesthood, he had ever abused an altar boy, the priest responded, “I can’t tell you this. I can only tell my confessor any sin of mine. I don’t need to admit or deny.”

The two other well-known priests accused of abuse are Father Raimundo Gomes and Father Edílson Duarte. Brazil’s Civil Police agency has begun an inquiry into the charges against all three priests. The local diocese has suspended the trio. And the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission into Pedophilia, which is being conducted by Brazil’s senate, showed the sex video to a shocked audience in the city in April. Monsignor Barbosa, stony-faced, sat watching. He told the inquiry that this was the only time he had had sex with the altar boy.

The priests are fighting back—and thickening the plot. A lawyer for Barbosa says the altar boys, Flávio and Fabiano, attempted to extort about 5 million reals (US$2.8 million) from his client. Reporter Connection showed a copy of a document signed by Barbosa and the altar boys in June 2009 in which the boys agreed to destroy the video in return for a payment of R$32,000 (US$18,000). Fabiano says money was paid, but that he kept a copy of the tape. According to police, both boys ultimately received just R$500 each. “They received the money but not the total,” lead investigator Angelita Sousa told The Daily Beast. “The rest went to other places.” She would not elaborate.

Brazil is a paradox: a deeply conservative country with a pragmatic and open attitude toward sex. Love motels, where one can rent a room by the hour, line every city’s major highways. Romance and lust are the main themes in every soap opera. In a recent survey, 82 percent of Brazilians said they were confident that they know how to have a happy sex life. Casual sex doubled between 2004 and 2008, another survey reported.

Yet homosexuality remains an awkward subject here. Many gay couples never come out to their parents. “Bicha,” or “bitch,” is slang for a gay man, and is used as a popular insult. Gay-bashing is common. And yet the winner of the latest season of the reality-TV show Big Brother was forced to backtrack on homophobic comments he made about the show’s gay contestants. When it comes to gay issues, Brazil seems awkwardly wedged between the past and the present.

This awkwardness has been made crystal clear as the sex-abuse case unfolds. The local bishop, Dom Valério Breda, told Brazil’s biggest broadsheet that the sex tape wasn’t all that shocking because it simply showed consensual sex between two adults. (Fabiano was 18 when the video was shot in January 2009; Barbosa was in his eighties.) “It was a homosexual act, because the actors of that scene were of age,” the bishop insisted. He went on to tell the paper that he, too, had been subject to a blackmail attempt of R$1 million, and that he had known about the video’s existence for a year but had not alerted his community because the information was “nebulous.”

Other bombshells dropped during the three days the senate inquiry took place in Arapiraca. Father Duarte admitted he had sexually abused both Flávio and Fabiano, but suggested his victims were wrong to come forward. “I regret that these accusations have come from people who ate at my table,” he intoned. “Just as Jesus said: ‘Those who ate my bread are those who betray me.’”

And the third accused priest, Father Gomes, denied that any abuse took place at all, insisting he was victim of “revenge,” and accused a third altar boy, Anderson Farias Silva, of attempting to extort money from him. Silva said that Father Gomes had abused him since he was 14.

Furthermore, because Father Duarte is cooperating with the investigation, Brazilian police say he fears for his safety. “He asked for protection during the [senate inquiry] because he had denounced the others and he was scared,” says Officer Sousa. Father Duarte also said he believes Father Gomes to be “dangerous.”

The case has forced Brazil to confront the same issues that much of the Catholic world is now facing. “Brazil will no longer tolerate more abuse against children and adolescents,” concluded Senator Magno Malta, president of the senate inquiry. “What was seen in these three days (of inquiry) was a mosaic of hate, shame, and disgust.” Both the police and the senate inquiries continue, and Brazilian police tell The Daily Beast that theirs is nearly complete. “Probably in the first week of May we will be delivering our investigation to the judiciary,” said Officer Sousa.

This week, following the pope’s lead, the local bishop, Dom Valério Breda, sent a letter to his flock asking for forgiveness. “We feel, yes, shame and dishonor at the violation of the dignity of the human person and we regret the blow delivered to the church,” he wrote.

He said he had talked to Monsignor Barbosa, but that the two men did not discuss the abuse allegations directly. “He is a certain age and I didn’t want to treat him like any boy,” said the bishop. Instead, he said Monsignor Barbosa used a Latin phrase from the Psalms of David: “Peccatum meum ante me est semper.” Or, “My sin is always in front of me.”

In many ways, the scandal rocking Arapiraca feels like a backwater version of the Catholic Church’s larger crisis, its secrets and lies even darker, its coverups even more inept. Priests accusing the alleged victims of blackmail, using Latin psalms to talk around child-abuse charges, and defending the incidents as sex between consenting adults (even though gay sex is forbidden by the Catholic Church.) No wonder this institution is flailing on the ropes.

As for the alleged victims, they appear to be struggling to reconcile their faith with what’s happened to them.

“I believe a lot in God,” Fabiano told Reporter Connection. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe in any church anymore.”

British journalist Dom Phillips moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2007 to write his book Superstar DJs Here We Go (Random House/Ebury 2009) and works as a correspondent covering news, economics, and celebrity. He now writes for The Times, People, Financial Times, Observer, and Grazia.

The Church and Nazis

FT
February 5, 2009

Pope Benedict XVI has done it again. In September 2006, in the course of an arcane speech about the de-Hellenisation of Christianity, he managed to enrage Muslims by throwing in a quote from a Byzantine emperor on Islam being violent, evil and inhuman. We all missed the point, the Vatican said. His Holiness was talking about the relationship between faith and reason.

Last month, Pope Benedict received back into the Catholic Church four clerics excommunicated in 1988, including an English-born bishop, Richard Williamson, who had just told Swedish television “not a single Jew died in a gas chamber”. Despite widespread outrage, apparently we all missed the point again. The Pope was trying to heal a schism in the Church, the Vatican said, and Benedict was not even aware of the bishop’s views.

As the furore grew, the Vatican ordered the renegade bishop to recant. But this simply won’t wash.

Mr Williamson and his colleagues belong to the Society of Saint Pius X and were ordained bishops – illicitly under canon law – by its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who led a rebellion against the opening up of the Church started by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. That is why they were chucked out, despite the best efforts of the Pope – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – to keep them in. Mr Williamson has long been openly anti-Semitic, from a fundamentalist group that has flirted with fascism in its defence of causes from Vichy France to Francoist Spain.



There is also the excellent film by Costa-Gavras on the collusion between the Church and Nazis - "Amen"

Churches skirt destruction in Pakistan

Three churches were attacked in Karachi, Pakistan's economic capital
Sunday, February 01, 2009
SperoForum
By Aftab Mughal


Within a week, three churches were attacked in Karachi city, an economic capital of Pakistan. The Christ Awami Church was attacked twice; a church in Zia Colony in Korangi was also attacked, while a third Reformed Presbyterian Church in Golimar was attacked on Jan. 4.

Pakistan Minorities Front Chairman Michael Javaid (also a former Christians Member of Provincial Assembly, MPA) said that the R. P. Church was attacked allegedly by a group of Baloch men. The police intervened, however, and prevented the church from being destroyed, The News, a Pakistani English daily, reported on Jan. 6. During the attack on Christ Awami Church, unidentified men smashed windows of the church, broke a cross on the wall, damaged hymn books and dumped garbage in the premises of the church. An FIR was lodged the following day after immense pressure and protests from the Christian community.

However, according to Daily Times, another Pakistani English daily, of Jan. 3, the Boat Basin police arrested three men Sher Zaman, Sher Zamir and Bakhti Rehman for pelting Christ Awami Church in the Shah Rasool Colony under a registered case (First Information Report No 04/2009). A member of the church Yaqub Nazar said, “There was a fight between the young men from our community and others during a football match and we were threatened with consequences.”

Aftab Mughal edits the Minorities Concern newsletter of Pakistan.

Bangladesh's last Armenian

Bangladesh's last Armenian prays for unlikely future
Arab Times

DHAKA, Feb 1, 2009 (AFP) - Michael Joseph Martin is guarded about his exact age and reluctant to accept he will be the last in a long line of Armenians to make a major contribution to the history of Bangladesh.

Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, was once home to thousands of migrants from the former Soviet republic who grew to dominate the city's trade and business life.

But Martin, aged in his 70s, is now the only one left.

'When I die, maybe one of my three daughters will fly in from Canada to keep our presence here alive,' Martin said hopefully, speaking broken Bengali with a thick accent. 'Or perhaps other Armenians will come from somewhere else.'

Martin came to Dhaka in 1942 during World War II, following in the footsteps of his father who had settled in the region decades earlier.

They joined an Armenian community in Bangladesh dating back to the 16th century, but now Martin worries about who will look after the large Armenian church in the city's old quarter.

'This is a blessed place and God won't leave it unprotected and uncared for,' he said of the Church of Holy Resurrection, which was built in 1781 in the Armanitola, or Armenian district.

Martin -- whose full name is Mikel Housep Martirossian -- looks after the church and its graveyard where 400 of his countrymen are buried, including his wife who died three years ago.

When their children, all Bangladeshi passport-holders, left the country along, Martin became the sole remaining Armenian here. He now lives alone in an enormous mansion in the church grounds.

'When I walk, sometimes I feel spirits moving around. These are the spirits of my ancestors. They were noble men and women, now resting in peace,' said Martin, who is stooped and frail but retains a detailed knowledge of the Armenian history in Dhaka.

Marble tombstones display family names such as Sarkies, Manook and Aratoon from a time when Armenians were Dhaka's wealthiest merchants with palatial homes who traded jute, spices, indigo and leather.

Among the dead are M. David Alexander, the biggest jute trader of the late 19th century, and Nicholas Peter Poghose who set up Bangladesh's first private school in the 1830s and died in 1876.

Martin, himself a former trader, said the Armenians, persecuted by Turks and Persians, were embraced in what is now Bangladesh first by the Mughals in the 16th and 17th centuries and then by the British colonial empire.

Fluent in Persian -- the court language of the Mughals and the first half of the British empire in India -- Armenians were commonly lawyers, merchants and officials holding senior public positions.

They were also devout Christians who built some of the most beautiful churches in the Indian subcontinent.

'Their numbers fluctuated with the prospects in trading in Dhaka,' said Muntasir Mamun, a historian at Dhaka University.

'Sometimes there were several thousand Armenians trading in the Bengal region. They were always an important community in Dhaka and dominated the country's trading. They were the who's who in town. They celebrated all their religious festivals with pomp and style.'

The decline came gradually after the British left India and the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 with Dhaka becoming the capital of East Pakistan and then of Bangladesh after it gained independence in 1971.

These days, the Armenian Church holds only occasional services on important dates in the Orthodox Christian calendar, with a Catholic priest from a nearby seminary coming in to lead prayers at Christmas.

Martin said the once-busy social scene came to a halt after the last Orthodox priest left in the late 1960s, but he is determined to ensure the church's legacy endures.

'Every Sunday was a day of festival for us. Almost every Armenian would attend the service, no matter how big he was in social position. The church was the centre of all activities,' he said.

'I've seen bad days before, but we always bounced back. I am sure Armenians will come back here for trade and business. I will then rest in peace beside my wife.'