So, I visited my friendly local mosque...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a ridiculous piece in the Daily Mail, where David Goodhart, a writer with a book to peddle, portrayed Merton, the borough where I live, as some sort of hateful war zone where immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, were not integrating. I did not recognise the Merton Goodhart wrote about and I was appalled - although not especially surprised - that the Daily Mail readily published something with rubbery use of stats and blatant lies.

As a result of this original blog post, I wrote a follow-up post and another post when David Goodhart responded over Twitter. And then I was invited to visit the mosque which formed the central theme of Goodhart's disgust for the "polite apartheid" that he claimed was going on in Merton. The Baitul Futuh mosque was not, as Goodhart claimed, built to replace a dairy and steal local jobs. There was a seven-year gap between the dairy closing down and mosque construction starting. In the seven-year gap, the old dairy site became a magnet for drug-related crime. Now there is a mosque on the site, this is no longer the case.

On my visit to the mosque, I learnt about its construction - part of the old dairy was used to build the minaret , the building is clad in elegant, self-cleaning marble, light enters the part of the mosque where women pray via walls created from the same material used at Chelsea's home ground - oh, and it didn't cost British taxpayers a penny to build.

The mosque shares its car park with a nearby college and the college uses large rooms in the mosque to hold exams. This is not just an example of the mosque integrating with the community, but an example of the mosque actually helping save the taxpayers money - allowing use of the mosque for exams means the college does not have to fork out for expensive building works. Why anyone would disapprove of this is a mystery to me. There are no reports of students leaving the mosque after an exam as extremists or under pressure to convert to Islam. It is a lovely, quiet building - I can see why it'd be a more pleasant place to do an exam than a cold school hall.

Bushra, a woman I consider to be my newest friend, showed me around the mosque. Having visited mosques in the Middle East and Turkey, I was mindful of dressing respectfully and wore a long top over loose jeans and I had a scarf draped around my shoulders. I asked if I should cover my hair with the scarf when I entered the mosque but was told this was not necessary. If I had've been asked to cover my hair, I would have done so without complaint. Equally, I wouldn't walk into a church wearing a bikini and I'd ask someone to leave my house if they turned up wearing a "Keep calm and carry on raping" T-shirt - it's about showing respect to your hosts.

As we entered the main part of the mosque, we removed our shoes and Bushra talked animatedly about Islam and in particular about the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. It is the 73rd sect of the Islamic world and many adherents of this sect have sought safety in Britain because of persecution by other sects, especially in Pakistan. Unlike other sects, the Ahmadiyya community believes the messiah was Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, who lived from 1835-1908. Bushra explained that Ahmad was dismayed by fanatical Islamic beliefs and championed a religion of peace and justice. He spoke against religious bloodshed and recognised the nobility of teachings by Abraham, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu and Guru Nanak.

It would appear Ahmad was a man ahead of his time - he did not like the drive towards fanatical Islam in the 19th Century and it is hard to imagine he'd be thrilled by events such as the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks, the current Israel-Palestine situation or the fighting that has gone on between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland for that matter.

As Bushra told me, the concept of "jihad" is rooted in one's personal struggles rather than a desire to destroy other people. Suicide bombers should not be considered true Muslims as the Islamic view of suicide is much the same as that of many Christian faiths.

As such, I am quite sure that when I visited the Baitul Futuh mosque, I was not entering a dark and terrifying den of extremism. I am confident that there is no secret south London branch of al Qaeda operating from this mosque. I did not feel any pressure to become radicalised or to convert to Islam. Instead, Bushra and I drank tea, ate cake and samosas, and chatted for hours about the mosque's work, especially with secular charities, about the role of women and about life in general.

It was easy to relate to the reluctance of women at the mosque to pray alongside the men, given the head-down-bottom-up position for prayer - it's not a position I'd be thrilled to do in front of a group of men either. And while the men of the mosque have a group for the over-40 age group, the women do not because, quite simply, plenty of women were not keen to admit to being over 40.

Bushra told me about how her marriage was arranged, but not forced. Consent by all parties is important and, having met her husband at the mosque, it is clear that their marriage was not a case of forcing two people together with little in common. Arranged marriage was a way to meet someone with whom she could build a life - it is all too easy to judge this concept from the outside looking in. But Bushra pointed out that online dating isn't really any different - it is just another way to try and match yourself up with someone with whom you have stuff in common. Which makes sense. You can be very specific when you go trawling dating websites, right down to height and eye colour, just as an arrangement is about meeting certain criteria. Having a future husband/wife checklist is as universal as women not wanting to point their bums in the air around men or admit they are older than 40.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with Zara, the wonderful Muslim woman who used to clean my apartment when I was a spoiled expat living in Abu Dhabi. She told me that all most people want is peace and to live a peaceful life with their families. While families can take many forms, including your circle of friends in many cases, Zara's point was that underneath it all, people are not that different wherever you go.

The Baitul Futuh mosque is open to everyone. You don't need to make an appointment, you can simply turn up and someone will happily show you around without judgement. I said that it was similar to being able to walk into an open church and it was interesting that Bushra said she wasn't sure if she would simply enter a church. I'd never considered it from that perspective before - just as non-Muslims may be unsure about whether they can walk into a mosque and take a look around, plenty of Muslims are probably equally uncertain about whether they can walk into a church.

If you scoff at the idea of visiting a mosque, if you still believe that all Muslims are terrorists and simply believe every word in the Daily Mail, you are part of the problem. And if you are peddling the "Britain is a Christian country!" line, you'd better be as willing to show Muslims around your church (you do go to church, don't you?) as Bushra was to show me around her mosque.

David Goodhart responds!

Well, this is interesting... David Goodhart has responded to my last two blog posts, where I can be found criticising his ridiculous portrayal of the borough of Merton, in particular a distorted view of the impact of the Baitul Futuh mosque on the community, and a reflection on the response to the blog post.

I invited him to respond and this is what he shot back with over Twitter:

@David_Goodhart
@georgialewis76 happy to reply to Ranting person though the single FACTUAL criticism of me is wrong. Merton is 48 per cent white British.

Good. Fine. So why did Goodhart not include this stat in his article with a source? I asked him this and challenged him as to why he used generalisations about white people throughout the article. He uses the word "white" without any nuance using lines such as "The white population has more or less shuffled along the bench and allowed others to sit down" and "Poorer working-class whites are doing worst of all in Merton."

This attracted a response from Goodhart that basically asks me to buy his book, which is plugged at the end of the original Daily Mail article:

@David_Goodhart
@georgialewis76 I did include lots of footnotes in the book that the extract is taken from - perhaps read that and then complain

I told him that any relevant stats should be sourced in the article. That would be good journalism. There is no reason why someone at the Daily Mail couldn't have edited the article to cite sources. Indeed, Goodhart could have requested this before publication - the article is an extract from a book he is desperate to sell. The only footnote to the article is a line about how much the book costs and how to buy it.

Aboo Salik, tweeting as @aboosalik weighed in with:
@David_Goodhart how many factual criticism do you need? "Replacing the dairy which provided jobs for few hundreds" "when it was closed for 7-10 years and was the local crack den? Or small elite being invited to the mosque."

I'd also love to hear the justification for this part of the article, in which Goodhart creates the false impression that the mosque builders kicked out the dairy and caused hundreds of workers to be sacked and conveniently leaves out the fact that there was almost a decade between the end of the dairy and the start of the mosque.

Aboo Salik then goes on to win the internet when he invites Goodhart to get involved with a charity event in Milton Keynes that the mosque is helping. Just in case he is busy that day, Aboo Salik also suggests that Goodhart could possibly make a donation. After all, the multiple charities that will benefit from the event do indeed include those that help poor people, including the "poor white people" Goodhart mentions in his article. And failing that, Aboo Salik also tells Goodhart he is welcome to visit the mosque at any time. Surely that would be a good thing, no?

The invitation to visit the mosque is sincere. Surely, in the interests of fair journalism, the Daily Mail would be interested in a follow-up piece after Goodhart failed to mention the mosque's work for secular charities in his original article. After all, this is a newspaper that cannot get enough of follow-up articles by people such as Samantha Brick tackling the big issues of being too attractive for this cruel world.

At the time of writing, Aboo Salik had emailed Goodhart an invitation to visit the mosque and to attend the mosque's charity events. Goodhart is now considering the invitation. I will be visiting the mosque on April 12.

A postscript to the manufactured Merton mosque outrage

The response to my last blog post on a ridiculous Daily Mail story about the mosque in the London borough of Merton has been very heartening indeed. Multiple residents of Merton, the borough in which I have happily lived for the last two years, have told me how ridiculous they found the Mail's attempt to portray Merton as some sort of hotbed of racial tension. Nobody who communicated with me after my blog post recognised the Merton David Goodhart tried to sell us in an article cynically timed to coincide with news on immigration changes announced this week.

As well as an overwhelmingly generous response from people who attend the Baitul Futuh mosque, non-Muslims also shared with me their acceptance of the mosque and their complete rejection of the suggestions in the article that the mosque has somehow created what Goodhart appallingly called a "polite apartheid."

Goodhart wrote that the mosque - the largest in Europe so therefore an instant catalyst for ragefits by Daily Mail disciples - "replaced" a dairy that employed hundreds of local people. Except there was a seven-year gap between the dairy closing and the mosque building work commencing. Merton residents who have lived there for longer than I have told me that after the dairy closed, the abandoned site attracted drug-related crime. It was not a pleasant part of the borough and the mosque gave that end of Morden (for Morden is just one part of the borough - not that you'd know that from the article...) a new lease of life and a new and interesting community.

The worshippers of the Baitul Futuh mosque are from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and their slogan is "Love for all, hatred for none." The worshippers perform a wide variety of charity work in Merton. I have been visited by a mother and daughter from the mosque who were collecting for the Save The Children charity, a non-sectarian organisation. The mosque has also raised money for the Queen's Jubilee charities, they hold regular blood donation drives, hold clean-up days to remove rubbish from the streets and joined other community groups in 2005 in a campaign to save and sensitively redevelop a popular local park. This is not the work of a group that refuses to integrate with the wider community. Indeed, attempts to stir up anti-mosque feeling by the National Front in 2002 were rejected by local residents and it was peacefully inaugurated in 2003.

My blog post has been tweeted to David Goodhart and I welcome his response to my critique of his attempt at journalism. He has, at the time of writing, not responded. It could well be that the published article is the result of the original copy going through an extreme editing process, as happened to many people who have written for the Mail in good faith and not recognised the story that has been published. But even extreme editing with an obvious agenda does not excuse Goodhart describing Merton as a "polite apartheid."

It was also heartening to not get trolled by UKIP, EDL or BNP types as a result of my blog post. The closest I received to a negative response was a bizarre tweet with a link to a horrific "honour" killing that took place in a Muslim family in Mitcham. Yes, Mitcham is part of the borough of Merton and "honour" killings are completely inexcusable, but there is no evidence that the Baitul Futuh mosque supports such crimes or that the family involved even attended the mosque.

Since writing yesterday's blog post, I have met via Twitter some very friendly people from the mosque - it turns out that one of my new virtual friends uses the same butcher that I do. In a fine example of cross-cultural integration, this is the very friendly Muslim butcher who has joked with me about using wine with his meat - his lamb mince and my red wine-laden moussaka are a winning culinary combination.

Soon these Twitter friendships will move from the online world to the real world. On April 12, I have been invited to visit the mosque and I look forward to this opportunity.



Photo by Fin Fahey

The Merton mosque and the manufactured outrage

I try not to share links from the Daily Mail website because that is what they want - clicks galore to keep the advertisers happy, regardless of the nonsense the articles regularly peddle. But I am making an exception for a particularly bizarre article in Mail this week written by "leading liberal commentator" David Goodhart (although he identifies as "post-liberal" on his Twitter account). This is because it paints an absurd picture of the London borough of Merton, where I live, and the article needs serious analysis.

Just as Andrew Pierce, an openly gay man, regularly writes pieces for the Mail opposing such things as marriage equality, it would appear that Goodhart is a liberal whom the paper has decided is OK and therefore he can be used to further agendas. The pitiful "OMG, the Muslims are taking over and white people are becoming extinct!" agenda is the one Goodhart is helping push, whether he realises it or not. This becomes increasingly obvious as you read what Goodhart has to say about the Baitul Futuh mosque.

The Baitul Futuh mosque, the largest in Europe with a capacity to accommodate more than 10,000 people, is like a rage lighting rod for the average Daily Mail reader. As Goodhart tells us, the mosque "dominates the neighbourhood." Sure, it's a big building, but the edifice that truly dominates this neighbourhood is the unfeasibly ugly council building which looks like row upon row of broken, rotten teeth looming above the library. For those who are offended by the mosque, the very sight of it is blocked by repulsive council offices as you stand at the Morden tube station.

Goodhart then appeals to the Daily Mail reader's yearning for a bygone (read: whiter...) era when he tells us that mosque "replaced an Express Dairies bottling plant which provided a few hundred jobs for local people and lots of milk bottles - an icon of an earlier, more homogenised age."

In the mind of the Mail reader, this screams: "THE EVIL MUSLIMS CAME TO A NICE, BRITISH BOROUGH AND TOOK BRITISH JOBS AWAY!"

Except the dairy closed in 1992 and the mosque was inaugurated in 2003.

In an insult to anyone who suffered under apartheid in South Africa, Nazi Germany or segregated America, Goodhart says that in Merton "a polite apartheid reigns, an accommodation rather than an integration." He then goes on to tell us that "the white population has more or less reluctantly shuffled along the bench and allowed others to sit down." Honestly, he is making my innocuous middle-class neighbourhood sound like a place that requires the activism of a terrifying white equivalent of Rosa Parks.

The white rage continues as Goodhart tells us that Merton's minority population as risen from 10% in 1980 to more than 50% today and the primary schools "which were still majority white as recently as 2003 - are now 64% ethnic minority."

Except, according to the last census, this is crap. Of the 20 wards that make up Merton, all of them have white ethnic groups in the majority - ranging from 57.12% in Longthornton to 87.21% in Lower Morden. The overall average for all the wards is 75.23% of people in white ethnic groups.

There's no real explanation from Goodhart as to why a white majority (which exists even though he says it doesn't) is a good thing or how this awesome whiteness is defined. Ever the generous soul, Goodhart says that because there's no one dominant minority in Merton, this "helps to make the changes feel less threatening." Well, that's a relief then. We can't have the white people freaking out at all this multiculturalism.

And, like all good attempts to manufacture outrage, there is a paragraph to which any sane person would say: "So what?". Goodhart "reports" that at a park near the station, on a sunny day (not that we've had a sunny day for a while so God knows when he did this particular piece of stellar research...) "the place is usually full but divided along ethnic lines: large groups of Pakistani women picnicking with children, Polish guys drinking beer, young Indian men playing cricket, Africans playing basketball."

What would he prefer? If the Pakistani women and their kids had a beer with Poles before joining in a vigorous game of basketball with the Africans? Did he ask all these people how they felt about life in Merton? Is he certain all the cricket players were Indian, for cricket is very popular in Pakistan and Sri Lanka too? Hell, is he even sure all these people were born outside the UK?

Moving swiftly along, Goodhart inadvertently destroys one of the Daily Mail's favourite immigrant myths when he writes that "several of the more entrepreneurial communities, such as the Indians and Tamils and Iraqi Kurds, create jobs". So they create jobs, contribute tax revenue and aren't claiming benefits. Good to know!

But Goodhart concludes this line with the mournful "but they invariably go to members of their own community." Much like a lot of white people do, I would imagine.

Not content with passing off random observations in a park on a sunny day as fact, Goodhart plays another Daily Mail trump card - the fear of immigrant crime. He tells us that "some minorities import historic feuds." Instead of providing any real crime stats or interviewing anyone from the local police to back up this portrayal of Merton as a hotbed of racial tension, Goodhart tells us: "Orthodox Muslims in the area are suspicious of the Ahmadiyans [who worship at the Baitul Futuh mosque]; Tamil youths fight among themselves, as do Somalis; and the historic black (Caribbean and African) versus Asian antipathy is also played out on some streets."

Then Goodhart jumps off on another tangent and tells us that "economically, many minority Mertonites are doing pretty well in their enclaves." ("Enclaves  being Daily Mail-speak for "ghetto") He points out that it's the Indians and Chinese who are "doing best at school and in jobs, closely tracked by Koreans and Tamils" and, like the rest of the UK, "the white British are somewhere in the middle." I'm sorry if anyone is offended by people from ethnic minorities getting an education but this does not stop white kids from striving to do well at school. Are all white families failing to put a high value education for their kids? Surely that is a stupid stereotype on par with everything else Goodhart has spewed forth in this sad article.

Finally, Goodhart manages to quote someone, albeit anonymously, when a hairdresser tells him: "We don't like it, but we don't have much choice, do we?" of a "Muslim hair-cutter" who opened a shop two doors along. No, sweetheart, you don't have much choice - it's a free market economy. Offer your customers good service and good value and you'll probably stay in business. Would she say the same thing if a spate of Christian salons opened in Merton?

Then, after saying that the Ahmadiyans who worship at the big mosque are "model immigrants in many ways" and pointing out that they are grateful to live safely here and that they took out advertisements on London buses congratulating the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee, Goodhart goes on to quote another nameless resident. He describes him as "White Heritage Elder Male" and he was at a Merton council focus group when he said: "We've lost this place to other cultures. It's not English any more."

It is not clear what exactly parts of English life are now denied to White Heritage Elder Male as a result of all these immigrants. Goodhart didn't elaborate. Did he even bother to ask White Heritage Elder Male any hard questions after the focus group was over?

Is this gigantic mosque is causing the erosion of Christianity in Merton - that favourite measure of Britishness of the Mail? Probably not. Like the ethnicity question in the last census, the religion question revealed that a majority of residents in every ward identify as Christian. From a still-high low of 54.59% in Graveney to 74.36% in Lower Morden, it would appear that Merton is not on the verge of mass conversion to Islam.

Goodhart lectures us, saying that local political leaders "have no choice but to celebrate the new diversity." That'd be the diverse people who have has created jobs, opened businesses, paid taxes, not claimed nearly as much money in benefits as the Daily Mail would like us to believe and do such heinous things as have picnics, play cricket, drink a few beers and shoot hoops in the park on a sunny day.

The article then comes out with the usual argle-bargle about how we should be proud to be British. Goodhart, despite the earlier nonsense, even says that "very few British peoploe think you have to be white to be part of this." Good. Then why so much dishonest blather about white people being in a minority and losing their culture then?

Bizarrely, he concludes with the story of local Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh's father who arrived in Britain in the 1940s to work as a labourer. He married an Irish nurse, they had two daughters both did well with one becoming an MP and the other becoming General-Secretary of the Labour Party. Goodhart writes sentimentally as he tells of the father watching one of his daughters become a baroness and muttering under his breath: "Only in England... Only in England."

He says that he was "not technically correct - these things happen in other places, too - but they happen here far more than we admit and it's time our national story reflected them."

Right. So he concludes that our national story should reflect the achievements of immigrants? Or does he mean only white immigrants? It's hard to tell from such a flabby, directionless article what he is driving at with that conclusion. Is he trying to claw back some liberal credibility at the end? Is he trying to paint a completely false picture of the multicultural neighbourhood in which I love to live? Whatever the case, all this article has achieved is (at the time of writing) 571 reader comments, most of which indicate Goodhart succeeded in peddling more Daily Mail immigrant myths. Well played, sir.Well played...





Photo courtesy of sarflondondunc