هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
In January 2020, the British newspaper The Daily Mail published a report revealing that Muslims are the fastest-growing and most thriving religious group in Britain, compared with Christians and followers of other faiths. The report was based on figures issued by the Office for National Statistics as part of a government research project mapping the country’s minorities and ethnic groups.
Muslims in Britain
The report noted that the number of Muslims in Britain rose from 2.7 million people in 2011, representing 4.7 percent of the country’s total population, to 3.13 million in 2016, or 5.6 percent of the population meaning the Muslim population grew by nearly 16 percent in just five years.
The Office for National Statistics did not explain in its report why the Muslim population increased while the growth of other religions slowed. By contrast, some other reports suggested that a considerable number of Britons had converted to Islam in recent years.
Those indicators stirred the anger of the far right and the populist current in Britain, which began sounding the alarm out of fear of growing Islamic influence, which it sees as a threat to the power and stability of Europe as a whole.
Although Britain’s Muslim community is considered one of the strongest in Europe in terms of financial influence, political presence and ability to integrate, it still faces major challenges, chief among them the rise of hate speech over the past five years in particular. Official reports showed that more than half of the racist crimes recorded in the country last year targeted Muslims.
Long-standing historical ties
The history of relations between Muslims and Britain dates back to the Crusades between the 11th and 14th centuries, when the British army joined Europe’s mobilized forces, incited by the popes of the Catholic Church, against Muslims in the eastern and southern Mediterranean.
At the time, the image of Muslims was deeply distorted. Christians even referred to them as Saracens, a name attributed to one of the illegitimate sons of the Prophet Abraham and believed to be the founder of the Arab tribes. Europe viewed Muslims then as enemies of Christ and corrupters on Earth, and the idea that Islam was a divine religion and creed did not take hold in their minds until the end of the 15th century.
In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603) adopted a policy of openness toward the Islamic world, partly in defiance of Pope Pius V, who excommunicated her in 1570. As a result, the queen defied papal instructions that prohibited any trade relations between Christians and Muslims, and began building a strong wall of cooperation and entering into commercial and political alliances with the Islamic powers of the time in Morocco and the Ottoman and Persian empires.
Britain’s queen began dispatching diplomatic and trade missions to countries in the Islamic world, while also opening her country’s doors to Islamic delegations and providing them every possible comfort and care both to benefit from the flourishing Islamic civilization of the time and to restore her standing in the face of the pope. From there began the first stages of integration and fusion between Muslims and the British Empire.
After World War II, Britain became one of the main destinations for waves of migration by Muslims from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Muslims then began laying the first brick in the organizational structure of the Muslim community in its full form. Today, their number has reached 3.138 million, most of them working in heavy metal industries and trade, alongside others who have gravitated toward medicine, engineering and education.
A British particularity
Britain represents the freest model in Europe for Muslims to practice their religious rites. Although the state still does not recognize Islam as an official religion, it nevertheless allows Muslims to perform their acts of worship at any time and in designated places, whose spread across cities is permitted without the restrictions seen in most European capitals.
Egyptian journalist El-Sayed Abdel Fattah, who spent five full years in London, says Britain may be the country most favored by Muslims because of the relative freedom it grants in performing religious rites and rituals. There is nothing preventing the construction of mosques, the wearing of Islamic dress, or slaughter according to Islamic law, in addition to allowing religious seminars and lectures to be held in Islamic centers without any restrictions.
Abdel Fattah added in remarks to Noon Post that his wife, who was studying for a master’s degree at a London university, faced no restrictions during the years she spent there because of her Islamic dress, the hijab. He noted that the number of times she was subjected to harassment could be counted on one hand, and that it came from some members of the far right, who are few in number even if they are loud, as he put it.
It is not unusual there to find a Muslim woman doctor wearing a hijab working in British public hospitals something that might be considered almost forbidden in hospitals in Italy and France, for example. Nor is it unusual to find young people distributing Islamic booklets and copies of the Quran in public streets. That is how the Egyptian journalist concluded his remarks.
As a practical translation of that reality, Britain has served as a safe haven for many Muslims over recent decades, placing it in the crosshairs of far-right currents in Europe as the biggest incubator of Muslim communities and political Islam movements. Those accusations have intensified from 2015 to the present.
London: the capital of Islamic economy
Britain’s particular approach to accommodating minorities and granting them a relative margin of freedom did not come without a return. London sought to leverage that advantage to achieve the greatest possible political and economic gains, while also polishing its global human rights image as a destination for the marginalized and for diverse minority communities.
One of the clearest gains from that advantage is that London has become a capital of the Islamic economy, as former Prime Minister Theresa May described it. The city adopted an open strategy to attract investment in the Islamic economy, encouraging major Muslim business figures to channel their capital into the British market more broadly.
The beginning came in 2015, when UK Export Finance issued sukuk worth 200 million pounds sterling ($277 million). Since then, banks have opened their doors to provide Islamic financial services, and the number of banks offering such services has risen to more than 20, including five whose services comply with Islamic law.
According to a report published by the British government’s Regional Media and Communication Center, London has become the largest market for Islamic finance outside the Muslim world, ranking 22nd out of 124 countries worldwide that use Islamic banking — first in Europe and fourth among countries with non-Muslim majorities.
One striking indicator of the strong presence of the Islamic economy, reflecting the economic power of Britain’s Muslim community, is that the financing provided by Gatehouse Bank for the purchase of 6,500 properties in the northwest of the country, worth more than 700 million pounds sterling ($970 million), was structured in accordance with Islamic law.
The effectiveness of political presence
Muslims in Britain have not remained detached from political life as many communities have in other countries. They have participated actively and maintained a strong presence in some electoral contests, something reflected in the numbers on the parliamentary seats they won in the most recent elections. Eighteen Muslim lawmakers entered the British House of Commons in the 2019 election.
The overall trend points to a rise in both the level and scale of Muslim political engagement. After there were 15 Muslim lawmakers in the 2017 election, representation increased by three seats. Despite that gain, however, it fell short of expectations that Muslims would win 22 seats. Had the Labour Party not suffered losses, the outcome might have been different.
Although there are no official statistics on the political presence of Muslims within British political parties, the number of Muslim candidates fielded by those parties points to the reality and density of that presence.
For example, the Labour Party nominated 33 Muslims to run in the most recent election, with expectations that 16 of them would win. The Conservative Party also gave 22 Muslim candidates the chance to represent it in the same election, while the Liberal Democrats fielded 17 Muslim candidates, despite not putting forward any in the 2017 election.
Among the most prominent Muslim figures to assert a political presence in recent years is London Mayor Sadiq Aman Khan, of Pakistani origin, who has held the post since 2005 until today and was the first Muslim to serve as mayor of a European capital. He also held a ministerial portfolio in the shadow government.
There is also Sayeeda Warsi, of Pakistani origin, who served as co-chair of the Conservative Party from 2010 to 2012, minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and minister of state for faith and communities in 2012. She resigned in protest at the British government’s position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In the same context, the Muslim voting bloc has whetted the appetite of British politicians more broadly, who have paid close attention to this minority for two main reasons: first, to tighten the noose around fundamentalist Islam for fear of its expansion in ways that could threaten British influence in the future; and second, to win Muslim political support, which could tip the balance in favor of any domestic political current.
Accordingly, and in pursuit of both goals at once, the Sufi current was promoted in the country as an alternative to the fundamentalist current. This can be clearly seen in the British government’s shift in focus from the Muslim Council of Britain, regarded as the official representative of the Muslim community in Britain, to the Sufi Muslim Council, established by supporters of Sufi orders there and granted full British trust and support as an alternative body.
This Sufi council was inaugurated in 2006. The ceremony was attended by Ruth Kelly, the communities and local government secretary under Tony Blair, as well as the government’s adviser on religious affairs and local communities, Maqsood Ahmed. Prince Charles also hosted a number of the council’s leading figures at his palace and attended its events and activities, as happened in February 2010 when he received Hisham Kabbani, the Naqshbandi sheikh, to discuss the affairs of Muslims there.
Social challenges
Muslims in Britain face a range of social challenges that pose a major obstacle to integration, foremost among them fragmentation and disunity. Muslims’ cultures and ideologies vary despite their belonging in the end to one religion, making the community more a collection of disparate individuals than a single body with one voice that could strengthen its presence and influence. This can be seen in the disputes that arise over certain issues, such as celebrating holidays and Ramadan practices, among others.
This is compounded by the absence of a personal status law based on Islamic principles under the country’s secular constitution. As a result, Muslims there face many problems in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. They also lack autonomy in having cemeteries of their own, forcing many to bear the hardship of sending their dead back to their countries of origin, while those who cannot do so are compelled to bury them in public cemeteries that are often Christian in character.
Another obstacle is the social standing of many members of the community, with high unemployment rates and the resulting deterioration in education and health standards. This helps explain why some choose to live in poor neighborhoods, which in turn affects their living conditions and daily activity, and consequently their broader image in British society, especially with rising crime rates among Muslims.
Hate speech and racism
On Sept. 10, 2021, during her speech in the British Parliament on Islamophobia, Muslim lawmaker Zarah Sultana, a Labour MP representing Coventry South, broke down in tears, saying she had received abusive racist messages because of her religion and beliefs.
During her speech, Sultana read out some of the messages she had received, including: “Sultana, you and your Muslim men are a real danger to humanity,” “You are a cancer spreading everywhere I go,” and “Europe will vomit you out.” Another person, she said, described her as “the scum of the earth.”
The Muslim lawmaker’s account of the racist abuse she faces reflects the scale of Islamophobia in Britain, despite the country’s clear and highly flexible official embrace of the Muslim community. That may seem contradictory to some, but it is a contradiction rooted in the growing influence of the far right in recent years and the escalating hate speech that British authorities are trying to combat as much as possible, though without success.
Islamophobia in Britain, and in the West more broadly, grew after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. That prompted former Conservative co-chair Sayeeda Warsi, a Muslim, to warn in 2011 that racism against Muslims had become socially acceptable and was going from bad to worse, according to the American magazine Foreign Policy.
In the latest statistics from the British Home Office, police recorded 124,091 hate crimes in England and Wales last year, with Muslims bearing the largest share. According to the report’s breakdown by the religion of victims, Muslims accounted for 45 percent, followed by Jews at 22 percent, while 16 percent of the crimes did not target any declared religion.
It is worth noting that the rate at which Muslims were targeted by racist crimes declined from what it was in 2018, for example, when police recorded a 40 percent increase in such crimes overall, and nearly 52 percent of the victims were Muslims.
In another report by the British House of Commons, Muslim women were found to be the most vulnerable to discrimination compared with women of other faiths. It added that the number of Muslim women exposed to unemployment because of their religion exceeds that of Christian women by 71 percent when both sides are equal in education, competence and the required work skills.
Racism against Muslims has gone so far as to object at times even to their participation in sports, including walking in green spaces. That was revealed by the racist backlash against the group “Muslim Hikers,” which includes Muslim men and women who take photos of themselves while hiking in the British countryside.
The initiative, which aimed to promote the countryside and encourage walking, was met with attacks from far-right supporters on the pretext that Muslims had not respected Christmas and were carrying on their activities as normal a reference to the fact that the campaign coincided with the Christmas holidays. A report by the British charity Countryside found that only 1 percent of visitors to Britain’s parks come from minority communities, including Muslims.
In the end, despite the recent rise in hate speech driven by the growing influence of the extremist current, Muslims still tend to prefer life in Britain because it is the most accommodating and welcoming to minorities in general, and offers the widest margin of freedom for practicing religious rites compared with other countries. Yet Islamophobia remains the chronic headache for Muslims.