Leafy Loughton

by Esmerelda Weatherwax (September 2009)


I still don’t know what to make of this brewing brouhaha in Loughton that I reported on earlier this month here.  This isn't really an update, merely some further information and a few more thoughts.

As I said, I have been following the story of Mr Noor Ramjanally of the pleasant Essex town of Loughton and his allegations of increasing threats for his attempts to spread Islamic worship in town.

I know Loughton, so, some background.

It is a town to the North east of London, just outside the Greater London boundary so it comes under Essex County Council but it is served by London Underground on the Central Line.

The area called Loughton, which includes Buckhurst Hill and some might include Chigwell (if you watched the TV series Birds of a Feather you know exactly where I mean) is leafy, prosperous, middle class, or aspiring to such. In the 1950s an East End overflow housing estate was built next door in Debden. If anybody knows Young and Wilmott’s 1957 work Family and Kinship in East London then Debden was the estate they studied as Greenleigh.

Many of the people who live in Loughton have left places 5-6 miles away like Leyton, Ilford or Newham for what they hope will be a better environment for their families. These families include Jewish, Hindu and Sikh professional and business men and women.

Debden has returned some BNP councilors, one of whom is Pat Richardson. She is usually referred to when it is asserted that the BNP is overcoming its racist roots because she is Jewish.

It started in March when Mr Ramjanally who until then had worshiped at the South Woodford Mosque in Mulberry Way South Woodford which is 3 miles away and just into the Greater London area decided to branch out.

He started to hire a room at the Murray Hall (named after Len Murray former General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress who lived nearby) Community centre in Borders Lane for several hours on Friday for Islamic prayer. Leaving aside local assertions that when Murray Hall was opened it was specified that no religious activities take place, I know several churches who rent space where they can, over a pub in Dagenham in one case, for services. Those churches are, however always specific that their church is the people, and the premises not their own. Worship started with 9 men but grew to sometimes as many as 80 worshipers, although the usual number is, apparently 40-50.

Mr Ramjanally however set up a website for what he calls the Loughton Masjid which gives the impression to the casual observer that the Borders Lane address is solely that of a Mosque. This is causing concern that it is an attempt to open a Mosque in Loughton, an area with very few Muslims at the moment, but that more will be attracted to join a Mosque.

Exactly that happened in nearby Leyton and Walthamstow. A small building is taken as an ‘Islamic Association’. Very soon it becomes a Mosque. It grows. It needs more space for a larger congregation, classes, bookshops. They buy the shops next door and the houses behind. But it’s still not big enough. They decide to knock what they have down and build a huge 3 or 4 floor building, with a dome and a minaret to dominate the area. The council and local residents object. Friday prayers spill out into the street and worshippers block the public roads on their knees to prove that more space is needed.

I saw this myself in Leyton and Walthamstow, with the Lea Bridge Road and Queen’s Road Mosques.

All over the country local residents are now objecting to Mosque building and development with greater expertise on planning issues like parking or noise abatement and have been successful in limiting some expansion.

On 1^st July Mr Ramjanally reported that he had received a threat that said “We know where your child attends school and what car you drive”.

Threatening someone’s child is reprehensible. No excuses for that.

The next day the front door of his flat was set alight, described in later reports as a firebomb.

The report in the local Epping Forest Guardian is here. Essex Police have confirmed they are investigating both incidents as racially motivated.

The next thing that happened was that the BNP councillors wrote in their Epping Forest Patriot newsletter objecting to any ‘stealth campaign to turn Murray Hall into Murray Mosque’. It wasn’t couched in the most measured of language, well we are talking about the BNP here, but the history of other mosque expansion I described above is accurate.

The importance to Muslims of their sacred space, that land once held by Islam is Islamic forevermore has been explained very thoroughly by the reputable Dr Sookhedeo of the Barnabas Fund here and elsewhere.

The newsletter (copy below)was reported to the police and Loughton Inspector Tom Simons said it was “unhelpful” but did not break the law. The BNP were accused of trying to stir up race hatred, which they denied.

On

Wednesday this week the national Guardian (not the local paper; the Essex Guardian group is completely separate) reported that Mr Ramjanally had been abducted.