Birmingham education authorities buckled to pressure from sectarian hardliners and blocked a Muslim sect from being represented on an interfaith council, it is claimed.

Members of Birmingham’s Ahmadiyya Muslim Community were told that in order to be represented on the city’s Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) they would have to agree not to identify themselves as Muslims, after a threatened walkout from other Muslim members of the committee.

The Ahmadiyya are accused of apostasy by some other Muslims, who say they do not regard Mohammed as the final prophet. They have faced decades of violent persecution in Pakistan, and in Glasgow an Ahmadi shopkeeper was recently stabbed to death by an Islamic extremist who claimed his victim had “disrespected the Prophet [Mohammad].”

Fareed Ahmad, a member of the Ahmadiyya National Executive Committee, said the Labour-led council had failed to defend religious tolerance.

“SACRE is there to promote inclusion and respect of different faiths and to give in to such pressure undermines what SACRE stands for,” he told IBTimes UK.

Emails obtained by IBTimes UK reveal that Muslim members of the city’s SACRE committee threatened to walk out if the Ahmadi were admitted as followers of Islam. In one message, Councillor Barry Henley, Chairman of SACRE in Birmingham, said that the body would welcome an Ahmadi representative provided they describe themselves as “Ahmadiyya Community of similar wording and not Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.”

He claims that if he allowed the Ahmadiyya to be… read more at http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/birmingham-council-endorsed-muslim-sectarianism-against-persecuted-ahmadi-sect-1577946