The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, was born in Pakistan and is the first non-white diocesan bishop in the Church of England.

In 1986, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie arranged for him to come to the UK when, as Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab, he found his life in danger as a result of persecution.

Since that time, he has taken a keen interest in inter-faith relations and spoken up on behalf of the persecuted church.

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An extremist Islamist group, which remains legal despite Government promises to ban it, has urged Muslim students at British universities to fight Allied troops in Iraq.

Hizb ut Tahrir, which wants to overthrow democracy and establish a worldwide Islamic theocracy, distributed leaflets to young Muslims inciting them to resist the occupation of Islamic lands, according to a TV documentary by a former group member.

One leaflet read: "Your forefathers destroyed the first crusader campaigns. Should you not proceed like them and destroy the new crusaders?

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During a recent visit to the headquarters of the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), His Beatitude Antonios Naguib, the Patriarch of the Coptic Catholic Church in Egypt, explained how the contradictory legal situation in Egypt is making life difficult for the Church. On the one hand the constitution guarantees freedom of religion and conscience, he said, yet on the other this selfsame constitution enshrines the principle that Islam has the status of a state religion in Egypt and that the Islamic law is the "fundamental source of the legal system". In concrete legal situations intellectual Muslims appeal to the principle of liberty, he observed, whereas the general majority of Muslims live by the sharia, the Islamic law, which states that a Muslim cannot convert to another religion without incurring punishment -- which may even extend to the death penalty.

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