All my life I’ve been somewhat of a fan of well thought out and sincere interfaith work. I have seen the results of this work in action in various individuals who understand the beliefs of others and have their own beliefs understood by those who may not believe the same things. Groups like the British Council of Christians and Jews for example, have done great work, sometimes painful, soul-searching and disturbing work, in bringing peace and understanding between two religious groups whose previous relationship was not good.

I support the idea of interfaith but only where each participant is willing and able to be honest about both their belief system and those of their interlocutor from a different faith. I think honesty and a genuine desire to understand those outside your belief system is absolutely vital for successful and lasting interfaith work. It is this recognition of of the need for honesty and good faith between all participants in interfaith activities that drives my refusal to take part in any interfaith activity that involves Islam. I’m more than willing to engage with interfaith activities with Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and those of various other beliefs or those of no belief at all. But I will not engage with Islam or Muslims in an interfaith setting.

This is because I don’t believe that many Islamic clerics or other community figures who take part in interfaith work are either honest or have a genuine desire to get along with those of other belief systems. Although there may be some Islamic clerics who are willing to be honest about Islam and open about the religious nature of the conflict that Islam brings to non Muslim societies, these open minded and honest individuals seem very few and far between.

Too often have I heard Islamic figures involved in interfaith work dish out deracinated and downright false descriptions of both Islam and Islamic history. I’ve seen Islamic clerics gloss over nearly all of Islam’s undoubted and well known problems, promoted the ‘religion of peace’ lie and even sidestep over Islam’s bloody history of interactions with members of other faiths. I have even encountered a known Islamic extremist who managed to hoodwink a left wing Rabbi into treating him as a friend.

Although not every Muslim is an outright liar, I’ve met many individuals who acknowledge that Islam has problems, too many of those who involve themselves in interfaith work are indeed outright liars. Unfortunately these lies are all too readily gobbled up and treated as 100% truth by the middle class leftists, socialist Christians and Jews along with the terminally naive Quakers who seem to make up the majority of those non Muslims involved in today’s interfaith work. These Islamic apologists are often Janus-faced and speak words of peace to non-Muslims and push the false idea that the morality of the Ishmaelites is the same as that of Christianity and Judaism. Unfortunately there are a number of examples of seemingly ‘moderate’ Islamic interfaith activists who say one thing to a non Muslim audience and something quite different to a Muslim audience.

A good example of the two faced Muslim ‘interfaith activist’ has recently been published on the website of a US organisation called The Investigative Project on Terrorism (TIPT) They have been looking into the case of one Muhammed Shahidullah of New York. This cleric seems to lead a spectacular and worrying double life with one friendly smiling face turned towards the New York Police Department which he advises and to White House staff when he attended a interfaith event in 2017. His other face, which I would call his true face, is mired in all sorts of jihad promotion. TIPT examined Shahidullah’s background and found that he runs or is connected with Islam promotion outfits that actively extol the virtues of violent jihad.

This man, who could more than accurately be described as a ‘taqiyya artist’ is little more than an outright liar for Islam. He has been giving various individuals and entities in the USA a torrent of unadulterated bullshit about how Islam is peaceful and compatible with US culture, whilst allowing links to speeches by terrorists banned from the USA on his site.

The list of jihad promoters that Shahidullah and his organisations seem to be aligned to read like a veritable ‘Who’s who’ of Islamic nasties such as Bilal Phillips, Zakir Naik and Anwar al Awlaki. Whatever else Shahidullah may be he is obviously not the peaceful Muslims that the interfaithers were looking for. Unfortunately I suspect that knowledge of this man’s close association with Islamic extremism and his proselytising for this type of Islam will be ignored by the interfaith establishment. This interfaith establishment has a long and ignominious record of naively hoping that association with Islamic extremists will somehow make those who preach jihad non-extreme peaceful and willing to live in harmony with other groups. I’m afraid that this is not going to happen no matter how much either the secular or religious interfaith activists may want it to occur.

Unfortunately, Shahidullah is not the only two faced Islamic ‘interfaith’ activist of his sort out there. I’ve seen them in all sorts of interfaith settings giving us the ‘religion of peace’ guff and dispensing soothing snake oil for the gullible. They are not just doing this in the USA but across the Western World. If you the reader of this piece are involved in interfaith then you are part of this problem if you are not asking your Muslim interlocutors the hard questions about Islam or closely and critically examining their answers. Although whether these Islamic activists will ever tell the whole truth about Islam is highly debatable.

Someone, I forget whom, once said that it is impossible to make peace with those who actively desire your murder and that is a statement that I find myself wholly in agreement with. The ideology of Islam and far too many of its followers desire my death and the death of my family and others close to me. Therefore I am justifiably wary of Islamic clerics and other activists who are involved in interfaith. These activists are not in my opinion genuinely seeking cooperation and to walk the Derech haShalom – the path of peace – but are merely engaged in a dishonest performance where they pretend both they and their cult are peaceful in order to deceive the unwary and the naive. As I said earlier I fully support sensible and genuine and honest interfaith work between every faith other than Islam and I have come to that point of view because on far too many occasions have I seen Muslims involved in interfaith utter complete falsehoods about Islam when they should have been honest.