I was there at Leyton Mosque, during Usama's Evolution lecture. The incident and death threats were greatly exaggerated and overblown, media sensationalism at it's best. All you had at the event was one immature child aged 13-14 shouting about him apostatising and how it deserves the death penalty. Then you had that clown from Islamic Awakening afterwards making a video about how accepting Evolution makes you an apostate and under Islamic Sharia and only under Islamic Sharia that should get you the death penalty.
Did anyone record the lecture in its entirety?
Here's one clip of Usama Hasan's lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgR-xfJbQcQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=87Here's a clip of Suhaib Husan addressing hecklers afterwards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CN-nB0azHII couldn't find a clip where some 14-year-old called for his death. The mosque-goers seemed very riled up, so I don't find it hard to believe that he received many death threats, and can understand why he didn't take them lightly.
Usama rinsed and exploited the fuck out of the incident to vastly increase his public and media profile and bank account. This is self-evident in how he has left his academia job to become a full-time anti-extremist with Majid you-can-buy my book-of-amazon Nawaaz.
Is he being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by the Quilliam Foundation to concoct the problem of anti-intellectualism in the Pakistani Muslim community in the UK?
Hardly anybody knew of him before the Evolution talk. London muslims only knew him as the son of Suhaib Hasan who got one Juma a month because his dad was chairman of the mosque. Usama doesn't even have any qualifications in islam at all, so it makes me chuckle when ex-muslims and Maajid Nawaz go around calling him "Sheikh" and "Islamic Scholar". He has no expertise or formal training at all to be going around publicly speaking about Islam and giving fatwas as he does. It's ok to call out Mo Ansar for making up job title's and credentials but not them Quilliam guys AMRITE ?
Apparently, Usama Hasan is a hafiz, and holds an ijazah in the Qur'an and an ijazah in the hadith, which he received under his grandfather Abdul Ghaffar Hasan, who also taught Dr. Yasir Qadhi.
Usama departure from the mosque had very little if anything to do with Evolution, it was internal mosque politics and a power struggle between the Hasan family and the rest of the mosque. The general feeling amongst the mosque was that it was the Hasan family's business/dynasty/dictatorship and whatever needed to be done to undermine that power had to be done by the rest of the mosque. Many of the mosque committee's decisions were overturned when Suhaib Hasan went home at the whim of Usama's mum.
I don't dispute this.
The Hasan family claimed that "extremists" wanted to take control of the mosque.
Maybe they were saying this to demonize whoever disagreed with them.