AN ISLAMIC scholar who loathes Western values is advocating “physical jihad” in the Yorkshire home town of one of the London suicide bombers.

While Tony Blair and leaders of Britain’s Muslims were condemning extremism at their Downing Street summit, Mufti Zubair Dudha explained why British foreign policy led directly to the 7/7 atrocities. Mr Dudha, 29, teaches primary school children, teenagers and young adults at his Islamic Tarbiyah academy in Dewsbury.

He condemned the London atrocities and signed the Sunni Muslim fatwa against suicide bombings, but he is also an advocate of jihad. In his foreword to a 1996 translation of a pamphlet by one of his mentors, entitled Jihaad, Mr Dudha wrote: “Today many of us are misled into believing that in our times jihad of the sword is not warranted. Most definitely physical jihad is, and will be needed to a large extent.”

Later he added: “Besides the jihad of the pen and tongue, the Muslim ummah [nation] cannot be exempted from physical jihad. No learned person and no true Muslim can deny the benefits, fruits and blessings of physical jihad for the course of Allah.” One chapter title in the book is: “Preparing for Jihad and obtaining warfare equipment is also compulsory.”

Writings such as these could be declared illegal under the Government’s plans to introduce laws against glorifying or indirectly inciting terrorism. For now they remain legal.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said yesterday that his force has had 19 attempts to prosecute seven “preachers of hate” for incitement to racial hatred rejected by prosecution lawyers.

At his academy in Dewsbury,the town where the Edgware Road bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan lived, the softly-spoken mufti trains young minds to reject Western culture and follow Sharia law. Mr Dudha, who was born in Dewsbury, said that he understood the anger of young Muslims. His mission is “about channelling that anger in the right manner . . . controlling it and giving it the correct guidance”.

He told The Times that he was no extremist and that suicide bombings were wrong, yet his published writings repeatedly reveal contempt for the society in which he and his students live.

Recent police inquiries into the background of the suicide bombers have focused on the Iqra learning centre, a small Islamic bookstore in the Beeston area of Leeds. It is known to have been a regular meeting place for two of the bombers, Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, while Naveed Fiaz, arrested last Tuesday in connection with the London attacks, often worked at the shop. Locals allege that videos and DVDs sold at Iqra preached hatred of the West, showed graphic images of anti-Muslim violence and were used as a way of recruiting young Islamic radicals.

In Dewsbury, students at Mr Dudha’s Islamic Tarbiyah Academy are taught that “the enemies of Allah” have schemed “to poison the thinking and minds of [Muslim] youth and to plant the spirit of unsteadiness and moral depravity in their lives”.

Parents are told that they betray their children if they allow them to associate with non-Muslims.

WRITINGS OF THE MUFTI

ON JIHAD: Today many of us are misled into believing that in our times jihad of the sword is not warranted. Most definitely, physical jihad is and will be needed to a large extent . . . No learned person and no true Muslim can deny the benefits, fruits and blessings of physical jihad for the course of Allah

ON YOUTH: It is due to the inconsistency of moral preaching we have plunged headlong into the bosom of the deplorable kufr [non-believer] culture. As a result Muslim youths have drowned into the cauldron of vice, drugs, alcoholism and immorality of all sorts. Along with its crushed moral values, the West has handed down its recipe for moral and spiritual destruction

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Swine flu vaccine for all as drug rushed through
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes