Riyadh ul Haq, who has preached of the “evil influence” of the West, may be a faithful representative of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam but he does not speak for all Islamic scholars, let alone all Muslims. No one knows that better than Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra.

Mr Mogra, the chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s interfaith relations committee, is a graduate of the same Deobandi seminary in Bury, Greater Manchester, that Mr ul Haq attended, but he does not like to call himself a Deobandi. His vision of a pluralistic, tolerant Islam is starkly at odds with mainstream Deobandi thinking, as is his belief that for British Muslims “our loyalty to Britain must be unquestionable”.

Mr Mogra’s desire to forge an understanding of Islam that incorporates “British traditions like tolerance and respect for others” is shared by Hamid Qureshi, the chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques. Mr Qureshi, who runs an interfaith organisation called Building Bridges in Burnley, is not a Deobandi. His concern is “to break the Muslim shell, the cocoon in which we surround ourselves”. “To suggest that mixing with non-Muslims is somehow a threat to Islam is fundamentally wrong. We need to reach out to people on human grounds. That’s what Islamic teaching is all about,” he said.

Both men sought to distance themselves from Mr ul Haq’s relentless message that Islam preaches hostility towards the kuffar (literally, the unbelievers, although Mr ul Haq uses the word to mean all non-Muslims). Mr Mogra said that Mr ul Haq and like-minded Deobandis were “entitled to their views”, but he regarded his task as being “to make friends for Islam, not enemies”.

“Why waste energy criticising people when you could spend it doing something more positive? I don’t see why my creator would want me not to live in peace and harmony with my non-Muslim neighbours. This is a country which allows me to be a Muslim and which gives us so many freeedoms. My Government has done some things that I’m not proud of, but a lot more that I am very proud of. I would not wish to live anywhere else,” he said.

“The vast majority of the British are wonderful people; kind, polite and respectful. They have made us feel welcome and at home here. Many times, they have stood by our side. Why should I pass judgment on them?”

For Mr Qureshi, the problem was that “too many of our religious leaders are stuck in the past”.

“History doesn’t solve all of today’s problems and blaming others for all your ills is unIslamic. You can’t learn by attaching yourself to ancient history. The principles [of Islam] remain unchanged, but you make your own history by applying those guidelines contextually, to your own time,” he said.

Mr Qureshi said that the traditional Islamic scholars “tend to be educated in a very insular, unquestioning environment”. He added: “When they leave the seminary, we need to allow them to experience the wider world. The person who takes that journey emerges as a more constructive person. There’s so much good in this society, so what is it that we are scared of?”

Four traditions

The overwhelming majority of British mosques, about 1,250, follow one of the four Sunni schools of thought imported from the Indian sub-continent. Two of these, Ahl-e-Hadith and Jamaat-i-Islami, have been the traditional targets when concerns are raised about preachers of hate (the former) and the spread of Islamist ideology (the latter) in Britain. Yet in terms of numbers, they are dwarfed by the two main traditions, Deobandi and Barelwi.

Jamaat ahl-e-Hadith
(The Party of the Tradition of the Prophet)
Mosques: 42 in Britain, 400 madrassas in Pakistan.
Salafi group, founded in India in the late 19th century.
Closely aligned to the Saudi Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, puritanical, hostile to Shias and all deviant – ie non-Salafi – Sunnis.
Guided exclusively by the Koran and the hadith (contemporary accounts of the sayings and conduct of Muhammad), rejects most classical Islamic scholarship of succeeding centuries and all “innovative” beliefs

Jamaat-i-Islami
(The Party of Islam)
Mosques: 48 in Britain, 700 madrassas in Pakistan.
Modernist, pan-Islamist movement, founded in 1941 by Sayed Abu A’la Maududi (1903-1979), a journalist who became South Asia’s best-known Islamic scholar, and based on his teachings.
Religion as political ideology.
Seeks political power in order to remodel all aspects of life to create a true Islamic state.
Significant representation among leadership of Muslim Council of Britain.
Adherents intend to convert the world to Islam but are more likely to be found wearing a suit than the shalwar kameez

Deobandi
Mosques: 600 in Britain, 8,350 madrassas in Pakistan.
Neo-fundamentalist, revivalist movement named after the location of its first seminary in the town of Deoband, northern India.
Founded in 1867 to return south Asian Muslims to a pure Islam purged of British colonial and Hindu cultural influences.
Arguably now second only to al-Azhar, in Cairo, as the world’s most influential Islamic educational institution.
Theologically close to Wahhabism in teaching austere, conservative Islam

Barelwi
Mosques: 550 in Britain, 1,700 madrassas in Pakistan
The faith heritage of most Muslims in Britain.
Deeply rooted in rural South Asian culture.
Founded by Ahmad Raza Khan, a Sufi scholar, in the late 19th century.
Seeks to promote and preserve traditional beliefs in hereditary saints and shrine culture in which the graves of holy men are the focus of intense devotion.
Barelwis hold an annual festival, the milad, to celebrate the birthday of Muhammad.
Dancing, music and poetry all feature in what is a largely oral tradition.
Barelwis are generally, though not exclusively, less politicised, and more tolerant of other sects and faiths than some of their counterparts