This is a guest post by Amjad Khan
A hardcore Salafi institution such as Green Lane Mosque (GLM) in Birmingham is not normally the kind of place you would associate with flirting, sexual fetishes and sexual exploitation in general. Yet according to a new website called www.protectmuslimsisters.com, that is exactly what the Imam there has been doing.
The website seems to have been launched after a number of Salafi sisters took their complaints about sexual harassment to the management of the mosque, who responded by ignoring their complaints and defending the accused. This, it seems, encouraged them to set up a website chronicling sad tales of devout Muslim women who have been on the receiving end of sexual harassment from supposedly devout Salafi men who are abusing their position of influence in the community to prey on vulnerable women.
Prominent amongst the culprits is Abu Usamah Thahabi, an American convert to Islam, who is now the Imam at GLM. Abu Usamah was exposed as a raving lunatic during the now infamous Channel 4 programme ‘Undercover Mosque’ when he came out with this pearl of wisdom – “Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a PhD, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete, deficient. She may be suffering from hormones that will make her emotional. It takes two witnesses of a woman to equal the one witness of the man.”
He previously served at a number of American Salafi mosques but he doesn’t seem to stay in any one place for very long. In fact, he is normally chased out eventually, leaving a trial of abused women in his wake. Wherever he puts his turban, that’s his home and whilst at home, when he is not preaching bigotry, he’s out preying on women who belong to the Salafi community.
According to the site his crimes include:
- Receiving oral sex in the Islamic Library
- Exchanging sexually explicit e-mails with the wives of his fellow congregants
- Having Morrocan prostitutes in Dubai
- Have sex with women whom he promises to marry in his office at the mosque
This from a man who has already married and divorced many women and has 3-4 wives at any given time.
All this must be deeply embarrassing for Birmingham City Council that apparently uses GLM as a partner in their Prevent programme. I am not sure exactly what they think they are supposed to be preventing, it certainly isn’t virginity.
What is even more worrying is the fact that GLM intend to open a school in September. A school that has been given the go-ahead and will undoubtedly indoctrinate young children with hate.
I hope someone takes the concerns of these women seriously and I hope GLM gets rid of the sexual predators that work there. But if the past few years are anything to go by, things are unlikely to change.
