THE Church of England’s only Asian bishop has criticised British Muslims for promoting “victimhood” but turning a blind eye to the violence of Islamic extremists.

The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, attacked the “dual psychology” approach of many of Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims.

The bishop, who was born in Pakistan to a father who converted from Islam, has become a leading spokesman for catholic evangelical Christianity.

Accusing Muslims of seeking both victimhood and domination, he said: “Their complaint often boils down to the position that it is always right to intervene when Muslims are victims, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, and always wrong when the Muslims are the oppressors or terrorists, as with the Taleban or in Iraq.”

Failure to counter these beliefs had allowed radical Islam to flourish in Britain, and stricter checks should be made to exclude extremist clerics from the country, he said.

He blamed fundamentalist imams and the internet for the rising tide of extremism in Islam and said that immigrant imams should be required to undergo checks on qualifications, knowledge of the English language and an understanding of British life and culture in order to filter out fanatics.

Dr Nazir-Ali, 57, who attended a Roman Catholic school in Karachi, believes that Britain’s fundamental character derives from Christianity and opposes moves to dilute this by multiculturalism.

Examples about which he is particularly concerned include the Prince of Wales’s indication that on his coronation he hopes to be known as “Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the [Protestant] Faith”, and the failure of Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, to allow representation from the Christian churches on her Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

Dr Nazir-Ali, who at 35 became the Anglican Communion’s youngest bishop when he was elevated to Raiwind in West Punjab, first came to Britain to study theology in the early 1970s. He has described the kind of Islam in Britain at that time as “pietistic, Sufi orientated”. When he returned in the 1980s he was concerned to find it becoming ghettoised, with imams coming in from extremist backgrounds.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, Dr Nazir-Ali said: “I can see nothing in Islam that prescribes the wearing of a full-face veil.”

His remarks carry particular weight because he is the Church’s acknowledged expert on Islam. Both his first book in 1983, Islam: A Christian Perspective and his latest last year, Conviction and Conflict: Islam, Christianity and World Order, have added to his authority as an expert on the engagement between the two faiths.

His carefully timed intervention is at odds with the usual, equivocal utterances from Anglican bishops at pains to preserve interfaith harmony at almost any cost, even that of their own faith and Gospel commitment to evangelism. But it reflects the views of increasing numbers of senior churchmen, in particular from the orthodox wing.

There is a growing commitment within such circles that the Church of England must forsake the damp lowlands of appeasement as represented by the liberal middle ground in order properly to defend the faith of the 72 per cent of the population who describe themselves as Christian.

But the bishop’s comments have provoked alarm among Muslim leaders, facing a surge in Islamophobic attacks after the debate over the veil and the terror attacks of 9/11 and 7/7. Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, described the bishop’s comments as “very unfair” and “not helpful at all”.

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