THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND SEEMS TO BE GETTING A LOT MORE ASSERTIVE ALL OF A SUDDEN: Archbishop Cranmer: Nissar Hussain battered with a pickaxe in Bradford for converting from Islam to Christianity.

orefathers. Some are brave enough to convert to Christianity and make a public profession of their new faith in Jesus, but most commit quietly and incrementally (and often unconsciously) to morph to the secular-non-theistic attitudes of society. It’s no big fuss: they just prefer texting girls to reading the Qur’an, and watching Gogglebox instead of listening to some tedious imam drone on about dīn and duʿā. Not many would call themselves atheists, but there are very many thousands of young British ex-Muslim agnostics. They daren’t go any further for fear of..

Well, the grainy picture above is of Nissar Hussain being bludgeoned not-quite-to-death with a pickaxe. He and his entire family converted from Islam to Christianity in 1996, and life in Bradford has been hellish ever since. . . .

There’s a lot in here to chew over, but there is one fundamental dichotomous tension: “The Muslim community are largely decent people but because of the taboo of converting to Christianity we are classed by them as scum and second-class citizens.”

No “decent people” classify converts to Christianity as “scum and second-class citizens”. All decent people will respect the fundamental freedom of religion and the inviolable human right (and ‘British value’) to manifest whatever faith one chooses and to abandon that faith if one wishes and do so with impunity.

So, Archbishop, what are you saying about the Muslim community in Bradford? And, more significantly, what are you doing about it?