New course to help integrate Muslim converts

CANON DR Michael Green has commended ‘Joining the Family’, a new sixpart resource designed for looking to integrate converts from a Muslim background into the life of their local fellowship.

The Rev Canon Phil Rawlings, who has been described as one of Britain’s most experienced church leaders in ChristianMuslim relations, is chair of ‘Joining the Family’.

Commenting on the new resource, which comprises film clips, participants’ workbook, facilitators’ guide and accompanying book, Dr Michael Green said that the course has been ‘carefully researched and brilliantly presented’.

“Christian believers from a Muslim background are more numerous today than they have ever been,” he said on Monday.

A recent poll of British Muslims conducted by ICM on behalf of Channel 4 found that 91 per cent of respondents felt a strong sense of belonging to their local area (the national average is 76 per cent) while 86 per cent of British Muslims said they felt a strong sense of belonging to Britain.

Some 78 per cent of British Muslims said they would like to integrate into British life, apart from on issues such as Islamic schooling.

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission commented on the survey. “The integration of Britain’s Muslims will probably be the hardest task we have ever faced.

“It will require the abandonment of multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and the adoption of a far more muscular approach to integration,” he said.

Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Perry Barr, commented: “I think the real issue is that their participation in British society needs to increase.

“What this [polling] highlights is that the community hasn’t progressed from what was happening in the 80s and ... that they have been isolated without being able to have further integration,” he added.

The poll also showed that over 52 per cent of British Muslims asked thought that homosexuality should be banned in Britain.

Shaista Gohir, the chair of the Muslim Women’s Network UK said that prejudice was unacceptable, though she argued that nearly 50 per cent of Muslims saying that homosexuality was acceptable is a significant sign of their changing attitude.

“Although they may not accept it from a religious point of view, [Muslims] accept that people should be able to have the freedom and right not to be discriminated against and live their lives.”

Meanwhile the former Bishop of Rochester has argued that Britain is unprepared to deal with Islamic radicalism.

The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali said at the launch of his new book: “Here [in the UK] the abandoning of the Christian faith by large numbers of people, the continual secularising of the state, and the large-scale rejection of Christian teaching in the mainline churches themselves has left the West unprepared to understand and meet the challenge from a religiously-inspired ideology.”