It’s Christmas time and so it hasn’t taken long for a national newspaper to run a feature implying British Muslims are poorly integrated for “refusing to celebrate a Christian holiday”. The irony of this pernicious Islamophobia, feebly hiding behind the banner of defending the Judeo-Christian values of our country, is that it is bereft of any meaningful understanding of Islam.
You see, the thing is, Muslims love Jesus.
In fact, the Prophet Muhammad said: “The dearest person to me in friendship and in love, in this world and the next is Jesus, the son of Mary.”
Respect to one of our local mosques who have filled up fridges on the street outside and said help yourself if you need food over Christmas.
But if Muslims respect Christians (and other faiths) why did 51 Islamic states effectively repudiate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of religion, when in 1990 they signed up to the ersatz Cairo Declaration, which asserts that all human rights are subservient to sharia law? In some of these states Christians are routinely persecuted and face extinction. [The Independent] Read more
