I was at Hammicks bookshop in London's Fleet Street on Wednesday to hear Michael Nazir-Ali launch a book on sharia law, Sharia in the West. I don't think I will ever be able to take him as seriously again. Politically, of course, his project is entirely serious. It's part of an attempt to take over Christianity in this country. For some rightwing Anglicans, Nazir-Ali is the shadow Archbishop of Canterbury. He has moved out of the official Anglican communion and aligned himself decisively with the conservatives evangelicals of Gafcon, which last week launched its latest attempt to disrupt the Church of England, the "Anglican Mission in England". Charles Raven, one of the leaders of that project, was at the Nazir-Ali book launch, too.
Gafcon is normally defined in the media by its campaigns against homosexuality but its members hate much more than that. Reform, the movement's branch in England, is also fundamentally opposed to women priests, and internationally they take a strongly anti-Muslim line.
The rich and influential Nigerian Gafcon church sees itself fighting a cold jihad across the centre of the country. Nazir-Ali, who comes from a convert family in Pakistan, has always been hostile to, and suspicious of Islam but in recent years he has increasingly come to talk of it the way that rightwing Americans used to talk about global communism."
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