Qatar opens first church, Pope Benedict Negotiating with Arab Saudi and the Oxford Issues in Brittain

After decades of worshipping in borrowed spaces, Qatar's growing Christian community is celebrating - albeit quietly - the opening of the country's first church since pre-Islamic times.

"The church will send a positive message to the world," Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, Qatar's minister of energy and industry, told reporters on Friday during the unveiling of the complex.

The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, will serve Doha's Catholic community, which comprises 90 per cent of the city's 150,000 and growing Christian expatriate population. When completed, the complex will be one of the largest Christian structures in the Gulf, Naim Fouad Wakin, the project contractor, told Al Jazeera.

With the opening of Our Lady of the Rosary, Saudi Arabia remains the only Gulf state to ban churches and open worship by non-Muslims.

Those who oppose churches in the Gulf often quote the Prophet Muhammed as saying "no two religions will come together in the Arabian peninsula".

But Abdul Hamid al-Ansari, former dean of the sharia (Islamic law) school at Qatar University and a vocal advocate of Doha's new church, offered another interpretation.

"This does not mean that churches should be banned in Qatar because religious scholars believe it applies to the Hijaz - specifically Mecca and Medina," Islam's two holiest cities in Saudi Arabia, Ansari said in a local newspaper article.

In Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, churches were seen as one way to attract more foreign workers.

In another news it was reported that a secret negotiations are taking place between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia to allow Christian churches in the strictly Muslim country.

The Vatican is negotiating with Saudi Arabia for “authorisation to build Catholic churches,” says archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, papal nuncio of Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Bahrein and the United Arab Emirates.

According to La Stampa, the secret talks, favoured by Saudi King Abdullah, have been taking place for several weeks and are considered an unprecedented for the Catholic church…
The Italian newspaper claimed on Monday that up to 900,000 Catholics live in Saudi Arabia, all of them expatriate workers.

Sad to inform at the same time (the site is here)that In Oxford, undisputed center of British tradition, the construction of the new grand mosque (not to be confused with the Islamic Cultural Center), had not received a warm welcome.

But the Muslims, having won the battle, intend to continue the offensive. They now express their intention to install loud-speakers on the minaret (that rises above the Oxford church steeples) to broadcast the call to prayer.

The pastor of a church near the mosque published an open letter in which he writes:

"We know, even if few say it, that the plans of radical Islam are to 'conquer Europe, England and Oxford.' According to this strategy the call to prayer is like a bridge-head, some are saying."

For the Muslim Council of Great Britain, this argument is as futile as the movement is inevitable: "The call to prayer will figure significantly in the future of Great Britain and of Europe. The adhan is already broadcast three times a day in the great mosque of East London and it has never caused any problem"

In another event, the plans for a Muslim community centre in Solihull have been withdrawn amid calls for greater acceptance towards minority groups.

Solihull Muslim Community Association (SMCA) applied for planning permission to establish the centre, complete with prayer hall, in Dog Kennel Lane, Shirley, with 50 parking spaces. Now the group - which has been searching for a home in the borough for 25 years - has announced that it has withdrawn the plans for "technical reasons".

Fears were rife that racial tension could erupt in Solihull following a leaflet campaign by the BNP against plans for the centre which also included a wudu for washing before prayer.

The leaflet, posted to homes near the proposed site, claimed there was an "Islamification" of Solihull and said the centre would lead to "conflict" and "discontent".

However, Dr Issam Ghannam, of SMCA, dismissed the BNP campaign as being "irrelevant" but called for political groups and church leaders in Solihull to do more to educate "some people".