1 Speech by Alex Younger, head of MI6, 8 December 2016, available at: https://www.sis.gov.uk/media/1155/cs-public-speech-8-december-2016-final.doc.
2 Home Office, Terrorism Arrests – Analysis of Charging and Sentencing Outcomes by Religion, gives 175 terrorism-related convictions of Muslims in the period 2001–12. This equates to 0.006 per cent of the overall UK Muslim population; see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-arrests-analysis-of-charging-and-sentencing-outcomes-by-religion/.
3 In late November 2013, a document that has since come to be known as the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter was received by Birmingham City Council. The letter described a strategy to take over a number of schools in Birmingham via the boards of governors and run them on strict Islamic principles. This led to an investigation and report published in July 2014: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/340526/HC_576_accessible_-.pdf. The ‘Trojan Horse’ saga is discussed at length in chapter 6, below.
4 The two-part BBC2 documentary Muslims Like Us, broadcast in December 2016, was an illustration of this diversity; see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/12/12/muslims-like-us-wake-up-call-islamophobes-everywhere/.
5 Heidi Hall, ‘Church of Christ Opens Door to Musical Instruments,’ USA Today, 6 March 2015.
6 Linda Woodhead, ‘Do Christians Really Oppose Gay Marriage?’ Westminster Faith Debate, 18 April 2013.
7 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), vol. 6, ch. 52.
8 The coin is held by the British Museum. See http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1093298&partId=1.
9 P. G. Rogers, A History of Anglo-Moroccan Relations to 1900 (London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 197[5]), pp. 1–5.
10 Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
11 Humayun Ansari, The Infidel Within: The History of Muslims in Britain, 1800 to the Present (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2004), p. 31.
12 Sushila Anand, Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul (London: Duckworth, 1996); Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R. I. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964).
13 Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14 Ibid.
15 Ron Geaves, Islam in Victorian Britain: The Life and Times of Abdullah Quilliam (Leicester: Kube Publishing, 2010).
16 Haifaa A. Jawad, Towards Building a British Islam (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 43–73; Peter Clark, Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim (London: Quartet, 1986).
17 My speech to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, Vatican City, 14 February 2012.
18 Brotton, This Orient Isle.
19 Razis refers to Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes or Rasis, 854–925), who was a Persian Muslim polymath, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher and scholar, a prominent figure in the Islamic Golden Age. Avicen refers to Ibn Sina (Avicenna, c. 980–1037), a Persian Muslim polymath who wrote on a wide range of subjects, in particular philosophy and medicine, but also astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age. Averrois refers to Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–98), an Andalusian Muslim polymath, a master of Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, psychology, politics, Andalusian classical music theory and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics.
20 Dante, Inferno, Book 4, cited in Brenda Deen Schildgen, Dante and the Orient (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, [1813] 2002).
21 ‘Michael Gove Redrafts New History Curriculum after Outcry’, Guardian, 21 June 2013, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jun/21/michael-gove-history-curriculum.
22 Humayun Ansari, in Remembering the Brave: The Muslim Contribution to Britain’s Armed Forces (Muslim Council of Britain, 2014), a pamphlet produced by the Muslim Council of Britain to commemorate the sacrifice of Muslim soldiers in the world wars, states that 1.3 million Indian soldiers served during the First World War, a large proportion of them Muslim, and 2.5 million fought in the Second World War. Again, a substantial number were Muslim. Moreover, Muslims were also employed in the British merchant navy: 50,000 by the beginning of the First World War, according to Ansari.
23 Military historian Gordon Corrigan in The Muslim Tommies, broadcast on BBC1 on 2 September 2009.
24 Ansari, The Infidel Within.
25 ‘Downton Abbey’s Turkish Diplomat Sex Scandal “Is Not Fiction” ’, Daily Telegraph, 11 October 2011, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/downton-abbey/8819485/Downton-Abbeys-Turkish-diplomat-sex-scandal-is-not-fiction.html.
26 Lucy Bland ‘White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War’, Gender & History, vol. 17, no. 1 (2005), pp. 29–61.
27 Ibid., pp. 106–7.
28 R. Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History, 2nd edn (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
29 Ansari, The Infidel Within, p. 98.
30 Laura Tabili, ‘The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (1994), pp. 54–98.
31 ‘I am directed by the Secretary of State to inform you that he has recently had under consideration measures to facilitate the control of coloured alien seamen at present in this country and to prevent more effectively the entry of others into the United Kingdom without proper authority; and he has come to the conclusion that in order to deal with the problem presented by these aliens – particularly those of them who are ‘Arabs’ – it is necessary that they should be required to register in all cases, including those where the alien has hitherto been exempt under Article 6(5) of the Aliens Order, 1920, by reason of the fact that less than two months has elapsed since his last arrival in the United Kingdom or that he is not resident in the United Kingdom.’ HO 45/12314, National Archives, Kew. The Open University, ‘Making Britain Discover how South Asians Shaped the Nation, 1870–1950: Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order (1925)’, available at: http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/special-restriction-coloured-alien-seamen-order-1925.
32 Understanding Muslim Ethnic Communities, Summary Report (London: Change Institute and Department for Communities and Local Government, April 2009).
33 Despite its foundation stone being laid in 1937, it wasn’t completed until 1977, when donations from King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and Sheikh Zayed, the then ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, finally got the project across the line. A half century passed for the journey from soil to minaret. And where today all too often local community objections and local planning committee bureaucracy can seem to make mosque building almost impossible, at least it doesn’t take ten decades.
34 S. Saleem, The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History (London and Swindon: Historic England Publishing, forthcoming 2017).
35 ‘Can I Tell You Something?’, ChildLine review 2012/13.
36 ‘Oliver Letwin Blamed “Bad Moral Attitudes” for Widespread Rioting in Black Areas’, Daily Telegraph, 30 December 2015, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/12072129/oliver-letwin-race-row-rioting-comments.html.
37 Black Caribbean pupils were over three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the school population as a whole. (Permanent and Fixed Period Exclusions in England: 2014 to 2015, Department for Education, 21 July 2016.) The rate is consistent with periods 2012–13 and 2013–14. (Permanent and Fixed Period Exclusions in England: 2012 to 2013 and Permanent and Fixed Period Exclusions in England: 2013 to 2014.) If you were a black African-Caribbean boy with special needs and eligible for free school meals you were 168 times more likely to be permanently excluded from a state-funded school than a white girl without special needs from a middle-class family. (Cited in the report They Never Give Up On You, Office of the Children’s Commissioner, 2012, p. 9.)
On education, a graph showing low attainment among black Caribbean and white/black Caribbean (mixed) 2004–2014 is available at: https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/rsu/sites/www.lambeth.gov.uk.rsu/files/The_Underachievement_of_Black_Caribbean_Heritage_Pupils_in_Schools-_Research_Brief.pdf.
On prison, see Grahame Allen and Noel Dempsey, Prison Population Statistics, House of Commons Library briefing, Number SN/SG/04334, 4 July 2016. The number of blacks in prison at March 2016 was four times their size in the general population (12 per cent of the prison population is black, while blacks account for 3 per cent of the general population). Also, a study of one million court records by the Guardian found blacks more likely to be sentenced for certain types of offences compared to whites: black offenders were 44 per cent more likely than white offenders to be sentenced to prison for driving offences, 38 per cent more likely to be imprisoned for public disorder or possession of a weapon and 27 per cent more likely for drugs possession. See: ‘Race Variation in Jail Sentences, Study Suggests’, Guardian, 26 November 2011, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/nov/25/ethnic-variations-jail-sentences-study.
38 Whitehouse v. Gay News Ltd v. Lemon, 2 WLR 281 (1979), AC 617.
39 ‘How One Book Ignited a Culture War’, Guardian, 11 January 2009, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses.
40 ‘Muslims in London Protest Rushdie Book; 84 Arrested’, LA Times, 28 May 1989, available at: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-28/news/mn-1613_1_london-protest-rushdie-book-blasphemy-law-satanic-verses.
41 Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 47.
42 A. Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 131.
43 ‘How One Book Ignited a Culture War’.
44 D. Lockwood, Islamic Republic of Dewsbury, 2nd edn (Batley: The Press News Ltd, 2012).
45 P. Bagguley and Y. Hussain, The Bradford ‘Riot’ of 2001: A Preliminary Analysis, paper presented to the Ninth Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 22–4 April 2003, available at: http://pascalfroissart.online.fr/3-cache/2003-bagguley-hussain.pdf; T. Cantle, Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (London: Home Office, 2001); A. Kundnani, ‘From Oldham to Bradford: the Violence of the Violated’, in The Three Faces of British Racism (London: Institute of Race Relations, 2001); V. S. Kalra, ‘Extended View: Riots, Race and Reports: Denham, Cantle, Oldham and Burnley Inquiries’, Sage Race Relations Abstracts, vol. 27, no. 4 (2002), pp. 20–30; C. Alexander, ‘Imagining the Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Youth After “the Riots” ’, Critical Social Policy, vol. 24, no. 4 (2004), pp. 526–49.
46 L. Ray and D. Smith, ‘Racist Offending, Policing and Community Conflict’, Sociology, vol. 38, no. 4 (2004), pp. 681–99.
47 A. Kundnani, Four Sentences Reduced, Eleven Upheld, in Appeal for Bradford Rioters (Institute of Race Relations, 2003).
48 Kundnani, ‘From Oldham to Bradford’.
49 ‘London’s Mecca Rich: The Rise of the Muslim Multi-millionaires Splashing Their Cash’, Evening Standard, 30 October 2013, available at: http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/londons-mecca-rich-the-rise-of-the-muslim-multi-millionaires-splashing-their-cash-8913153.html.
50 There are many words in the English language that derive from Arabic. Commonly used words such as sugar, cotton, coffee, even alcohol are words that have Arabic roots; mattress too, and, in our social media age, algebra and algorithm. We tend to forget how many words commonly used in the English language have Arabic origins.