An official state visit by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to London, complete with an audience with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, is being overshadowed by a report that the Saudi government is funding the promotion of terrorism and intolerance in British mosques.

Prime Minister Brown is being strongly urged to condemn the Saudis’ funding of documents that encourage jihad in Britain when he meets with the king in Downing Street today.

The report, the result of a yearlong study commissioned by an independent, centrist, nonpartisan, nonreligious think tank, the Policy Exchange, found that “hate literature” directly funded by the Saudi government was in a quarter of British mosques.

Among the documents, which independent experts translated from the Arabic, were appeals to British Muslims to set up a separate state within Britain and conspiracy theories suggesting that birth control is a plot against Muslims and that pornography is part of a Jewish cabal.

The documents promote jihad “against a tyrant, oppressors, people of bid’ah [Muslim innovators], or wrongdoers. This type of jihad is best done through force if possible”; declare that “The Jews and the Christians are the enemies of the Muslim”; and advocate that “Whoever changes his religion, kill him” and that “Whoever takes part in stoning a married adulterer, is rewarded for that, and it is not fitting for anyone to abstain from it.”

The head of the counterterrorism command at New Scotland Yard, Peter Clarke, said five of the publications cited were found by police as they investigated acts of terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The author of the report, “The Hijacking of British Islam,” Denis MacEoin, who headed four research teams which investigated almost 100 mosques and Islamic centers, received his doctorate in Persian and Islamic studies from Cambridge University. He is a fellow at Newcastle University who has taught Islamic studies at universities in Durham, England, and Fez, Morocco.

King Abdullah’s arrival in London, in a fleet of five planes, has already been surrounded by controversy.

On the eve of his visit, the king said the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005, could have been prevented if the British authorities had taken notice of information provided by the Saudis, a suggestion British intelligence has dismissed as preposterous.

“No prior warning of the attacks was received from any source,” MI5 said on its Web site. “The Saudis provided information about possible planning for an attack in the UK which was materially different from the attacks that took place in London on 7 July.”

The 200-page “hate literature” report, which can be read in full at http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/libimages/307
.pdf, condemns the Saudi government for promulgating hatred and for funding the inspiration of terrorism. Most alarmingly, seditious literature was found on display in some of Britain’s most prominent mosques, where members of the royal family and senior government members have been made welcome.

The report provides dozens of examples of literature designed to incite Muslims to break the law, to undermine the British way of life, and to hate Christians and Jews. Among the pamphlets are extracts published by the Saudi Ministry of Education from a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”

Some of the material demands death for those who dare convert from the Islamic faith. A document found in mosques in Edinburgh, Oxford, Birmingham, and London, declares: “These reasons would make someone’s blood permissible to spill” for leaving the faith “and his wealth permissible to be usurped, because he is no longer a Muslim.”

The literature is repeatedly aimed against women. A pamphlet at two mosques condemns to hell “The grumbler … the woman who complains against her husband. … The woman who adorns herself. The woman who apes men, tattoos, cuts hair short and alters nature.”

It is also anti-gay. According to a fatwa document found in an East London mosque, “the punishment for [a homosexual] is that he be killed. Or, to be burnt or to be stoned. Or, to be thrown from the highest point (mountain, tower, lofty building etc.), then to follow it with stoning.”

The report’s authors conclude that Mr. Brown should confront King Abdullah directly while he is London, that mosques should remove hate literature, that all state agencies should withdraw support from mosques continuing to foster such hatred, and that Islamic schools should forgo their independence and be integrated into the state school system.

The director of the Policy Exchange, Anthony Browne, said in a press release: “The majority of moderate Muslims will be as horrified as everyone else that pamphlets advocating jihad by force, hatred for insufficiently observant Muslims, Christians and Jews, and segregation have found their way into the UK’s mosques. The fact that the Saudi regime is producing extremist propaganda and targeting it at British Muslims must … be challenged by our own government.”