But, for many readers, it will stimulate a desire to understand; which alone would make it a worthy addition to the millions of words already written under the shadow of 11 September 2001.. A gathering of radical Islamic groups at a London mosque to mark 11 September led to protests by the British National Party last night. The two groups were kept apart by a heavy police presence outside the entrance to the mosque.Mr Abu Hamza entered the mosque with male supporters, their faces hidden by scarves. He said: “This is not a day of rejoicing, it is a day of thinking and rethinking.”I know there have been reports of celebratory Muslims but this is not for us a day of celebration.”Another hardline imam, Sheikh Omar Bakri, said of al-Qa’ida: “We share the same divine beliefs but we do not share the structure or methods that they use.” But he added: “Islam says fight those who fight you.”Of Osama bin Laden, he said: “Nobody loves him but the believers and nobody hates him but the hypocrites.”Earlier a few miles across the city at Regent’s Park mosque a service was held to remember the victims of 11 September, including many Muslims. Women in burqas and headscarves listened while Sarah Joseph recited a prayer for her friend Sarah Ali, who had gone to the World Trade Centre for a business meeting, never to return.Ms Joseph, 31, a lecturer on Islam who lives in Wembley, north London, said: “She was an ordinary, hard-working girl from a tight-knit Muslim community in London and she had just got married.”Right now, Muslims are feeling exactly what the rest of the world is feeling in its grief. We lost loved ones too ­ there was a prayer room in the twin towers where 1,500 Muslims went to worship.”The mood of reconciliation was underscored by Imam Hamdy Hashim, whose reading from the Koran spoke of the significance of peace and understanding between nations.

Also speaking to the mixed congregation was Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a Muslim convert and son of the Labour MP Frank Dobson. He said: “The world is well aware that those who carried out the attacks appa-rently attribute their actions to Islam itself. This attribution was and continues to be grossly offensive to the overwhelming majority of the UK’s three million Muslims.”. The vestments were red.

Not the black that the church traditionally associated with death. Nor the white that symbolises resurrection and which is usual at funerals today No, it was red, the colour of blood and martyrdom

The vestments were red. No, it was red, the colour of blood and martyrdom.
Some 2,000 people gathered in St Paul’s Cathedral yesterday – among them the Prince of Wales, Prince Harry and the Prime Minister – for a service to mark the moment a year ago when the first hijacked passenger jet was flown into the World Trade Centre in New York, sending shockwaves across the globe in ripples which have still not died away.The royal party was led down the nave of the cathedral by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, wearing a red cope stiff with embroidered figures of angels whose countenances looked demonic and warlike. Before them the crucifix, flanked by two acolytes, carried an image of Christ as the lamb who was slain.The order of service proclaimed it to be a liturgy of remembrance and commemoration. Though the mood among the 50 families of some of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the atrocity was one of profound sadness, the message which the service sent out to the nation was more mixed. Especially so at a time when the public mourning for the dead is increasingly enmeshed with the possibility of war on Iraq.It began with the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”. The singing swelled like a huge wave through the church, oddly dissonant with its message of moral defiance and its echoes of martial threat with its references to “bombs bursting in air” and so on.The sense of ambiguity was continued by the US Ambassador, William Farish, who read a passage from Isaiah about good news and the repair of ruined cities in a tone so desolate and grief-stricken that it seemed that he, and perhaps his fellow Americans, could not quite believe it.Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, tried to redress that from the other side of the special relationship with a bold and confident reading from Revelation about “a new heaven and a new earth”.