6

Islamophobia

‘In time we hate that which we often fear.’

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

A dislike of a group of people is not a new thing. The tendency to sweeping generalizations, lazy stereotypes and stigmatization of a community has reared its ugly and dangerous head at many moments in our history. And often when as a nation we find ourselves under pressure, usually economically, we have reached for a convenient whipping boy, often masked in the best of intents. So what I say in this chapter is neither new nor exceptional, it’s just current.

It’s sadly easier to blame rather than seek considered answers to complex challenges, and the current threat from terrorism is no exception. And whilst I understand, not condone, the ‘fear’ of Muslims that terrorists have been successful in instilling, I condemn the ever-growing reasons why people ‘officially’ say they don’t like Muslims, reasons which over the years have changed. It’s what clever folk would call an evolving narrative. I like to define it as the latest baloney to mask bigotry.

This approach is not new. Much justification has been provided for discrimination against black people. Historically many a European power, including Britain, felt ‘native’ Africans or Asians needed civilizing, needed to be prised apart from their native history and traditions and needed to adopt a western Christian lifestyle. Indeed, privileges including citizenship for these ‘natives’ in their own countries became linked to adopting ‘western values’ and lifestyles. We colonized them for their benefit, a sincerely held view, something that Rudyard Kipling wrote about in his poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Imperialism became a humanitarian cause, and it was the ‘responsibility’ of the white man and Christianity to introduce the ‘coloureds’ to a more civilized way, our way. And in this approach was an inherent assumption that the ‘white man’ was superior and the ‘coloured’ inferior. Discrimination was ideologically and intellectually justified as being in the interests of those who were discriminated against.1

Many a rational intellectual in the past and even today has reasoned an anti-Semitic position too. Roald Dahl, a wing commander in the Royal Air Force and world-renowned author of books like Fantastic Mr Fox and James and the Giant Peach, books that in middle school fed my appetite for reading, said in an interview in 1983, ‘there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews … I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.’ On the basis of this interview, Dahl seems to suggest that there is a justification for anti-Semitism, a reason for the hatred.²

And even that great British prime minister Winston Churchill wasn’t averse to peddling conspiracy theories of Jews having a malign influence and a ‘take-over’ agenda. Of Jewish Bolshevism he said:

this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.³

So even two of the nation’s most loved heroes have at some moment found a ‘respectable’ reason to justify hatred of the ‘other’.

It’s always possible to rationalize racism and covertly couch bigotry in ‘acceptable’ arguments; it is this form of hatred that is the most dangerous.

Sadly, bigotry exists in all societies, communities and countries. We are no exception. And I have come to tolerate that some people are simply intolerant of others. But I believe that the large majority of Brits are at least tolerant, most often accepting of ‘the others’, and are repulsed by overt bigotry. After the last presidential election in the US, I am not confident I can say the same of Americans. Personally I can handle overt bigotry. In Britain if the ‘overts’ get enough exposure they will show themselves for the small-minded people that they are. It is why I was content to share a platform with Nick Griffin when we appeared alongside each other on Question Time in 2009, when many objected to him being given a platform. I knew that if you give racists enough rope they will hang themselves. Griffin’s awful performance that evening, when he tried desperately ‘to reach out to Britain’, saying his appearance would give the BNP ‘a whole new level of public recognition’ but always with one eye on his ‘core vote’, was both pitiful and satisfying. Inclusive Britain took great delight in his sweating persona as he tried to justify his past associations with Gadaffi and the ‘non-violent’ branch of the Ku Klux Klan to one of the largest audiences to ever tune in. Griffin’s resounding trouncing at the hands of fellow panellists and the audience was the beginning of the end of the BNP.

So if some Brits hate Muslims full stop, that’s fine; it’s the latest form of prejudice, the bigots need a bogeyman, and ‘the Muslims’ are a convenient ‘other’, someone to blame for failures and shortcomings in their own lives. We’ve been here before and no doubt sadly we will be here again in the future. These overt Islamophobes – the likes of the BNP, the EDL and Pegida – concern me far less that the covert ones, the ones who dress up their anti-Muslim bigotry in reasoned intellectual arguments.

But what exactly is Islamophobia?

The UK’s leading thinktank on race and equality, the Runnymede Trust, defined it in 1991 as ‘unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims’.4 The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force’, whilst the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California uses a much broader definition including referring to Islamophobia as a tool which ‘reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended’.⁵ The definition of the Center for American Progress deals not just with the hostility, but its purpose: ‘an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life’.⁶

However, some argue that the term ‘phobia’ suggests that the fear of Islam is irrational, whilst many in Britain today believe that there is nothing irrational about fearing this very foreign religion. As Douglas Murray puts it:

A phobia is something irrational, but there’s a very rational fear in being scared of Islam today and wanting to act against it … Islam is not a race, it’s an ideology. It’s not bad to dislike someone for their ideology.7

Personally I believe Islamophobia is a bad term to describe bad behaviour. I prefer to use anti-Muslim hatred and sentiment.

The last decade had produced a plethora of commentators on all things Islam, experts who spend hours on news programmes and documentaries telling us all about ‘the Muslims’ – what the Muslims think, what the Muslims believe – and some even give detailed analysis on specific verses from the Qur’an. We seem to have become ever-greater experts on the Muslim problem with ever-growing analysis on why ‘they, the Muslims’ hate us, and yet little ‘expert’ time, attention and commentary is given to understanding and tackling why some of ‘us’ hate ‘them’, ‘the Muslims’.

There are many, well-argued, intellectualized reasons for Islamophobia. I will be focusing on seven, the seven sins that rationalize hate.

Sin number one: there is no problem, Islamophobia doesn’t exist. It’s a view taken by many, from atheists, to academics, journalists to bloggers, who say Islamophobia is simply legitimate criticism of Islam and a response to the actions of followers of the faith. Criticism of a faith – any faith – should not be silenced; indeed, there is a great tradition within Islam of questioning, debating and disagreeing. But vilification of a community as the followers of a faith, if left unchecked, translates into the persecution of Christians simply for following Christ, anti-Semitism for being Jewish and Islamophobia for the followers of Islam.

What do the statistics show?

In 2016 the UK thinktank DEMOS researched Islamophobia on Twitter and found that, in July 2016, 215,246 Islamophobic tweets were sent; that’s 289 per hour, every hour of July.⁸

Liam Byrne is the MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill. His constituency is home to one of the largest British Muslim communities. He ran a poll in his constituency in 2015 which found that 96 per cent of his Muslim constituents ‘believed Islamophobia is on the rise in Britain and a staggering 87 per cent said that they or someone they knew had experienced Islamophobia’. He singles out the media as a particular contributor to the climate of Islamophobia with 82 per cent of those polled in his constituency citing it as the reason behind the recent rise in Islamophobia.9

A worrying report from the Open University in 2016 found that 39 per cent of Muslim pupils had personally experienced racial abuse. Most abuse was verbal – ‘being called “terrorist” was frequently recounted in discussion, although 5 per cent also recorded instances of physical abuse’.¹⁰ Young people raised concerns about negative stereotypes, especially of Muslims, and wanted more to be done, including ‘organised events that bring young people together in a common activity such as inter-faith festivals or sporting tournaments’ and ‘better-informed teaching about Islam, in schools and in the media, to counter the assumed link between Islam and terrorism’. Young people didn’t merely want to be ‘tolerated’ or to ‘tolerate’ others, but to respect and mutually understand others.¹¹

I would highly recommend a Dispatches documentary by political commentator and journalist Peter Oborne called ‘It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim’. Aired on the third anniversary of 7/7, it investigated the rise of violence, intolerance and hatred against British Muslims. An ICM poll commissioned by Dispatches at the same time showed worrying results, with negative stereotypes of Muslims widespread. A pamphlet, Muslims Under Siege, was published alongside the poll and documentary which concluded, ‘We do not treat Muslims with the tolerance, decency and fairness that so often we boast is the British way.’ The report argued that it was time to end the ‘culture of vilification against Muslims’.¹²

These findings were also three years after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe passed a ministerial declaration at its High Level Conference in Córdoba on ‘Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance’, asking member states to collect and remit data on hate crime. We have been recording anti-Semitism since 2010. We are now trialling similar recording on Islamophobia, but definitive figures are unlikely to be available until 2018. I welcome this progress, but the discrepancy in the way in which we treat race, anti-Semitism or discrimination towards Sikhs on the one hand and Islamophobia on the other means that as a country we still fail to fully protect our Muslims.

The hatred of Muslims is real and growing, and incidents of unprovoked attacks on individual British citizens simply for being ‘Muslim’ are, sadly, despite being under-reported, on the increase.¹³ Despite Britain’s long history of tackling racism and anti-Semitism, on Islamophobia policy-making is still playing catch-up. These are not simply statistics, these are children bullied in playgrounds, women assaulted in the street, graduates not invited for job interviews, the media misreporting events and destroying reputations. Real people, real lives. So let’s not fall for ‘there is no Islamophobia’.14

Sin number two builds on one. It also fails to acknowledge Islamophobia, this time saying the challenge is hatred ‘from’ Muslims. It goes something like this: I don’t hate Muslims. They hate us.

In chapter 3 I discussed the history of terrorism and its many manifestations both in the past and in the present. I presented data on how many terrorists are ‘Muslim’ and whether it’s ‘us’ in the West who are the targets. Let me recap. Most terrorism is not targeted at the West. After 11 September 2001, only 0.5 per cent of all terrorism deaths have occurred in Western countries,¹⁵ and in the US, as David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, said at the launch of a report this year examining Muslim-American involvement in violent extremism, ‘The data in this report contradicts two common narratives in our polarized discourse about terrorism … [I]t is flatly untrue that America is deeply threatened by violent extremism by Muslim-Americans; attacks by Muslims accounted for only one third of one percent of all murders in America last year.’¹⁶ In the UK, since 7/7, we have had twenty-six murdered at the hands of terrorists; of them twenty-three were by Irish terrorists, two by far-right terrorists and one, Lee Rigby, at the hands of terrorists claiming to be Muslim.¹⁷

Most terrorist acts committed by those purporting to be Muslim or terrorism in the name of Islam are against other Muslims.

And yet against this statistical background we have an environment where all things terrorism are viewed as all things Muslims, and both broadcast and print media can perpetuate the myth that ‘all terrorists are Muslims’. I’d urge people to watch the moment in 2010 when Brian Kilmeade of the US TV network Fox said, ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.’¹⁸

One could dismiss this as the uninformed rantings of a Fox News journalist, but sadly even mainstream politicians get caught up in this propaganda. The 2016 US presidential election campaign was a stark example, jumping to conclusions and reacting to world events from prejudiced positions based on stereotypical views that all terrorists are Muslims. The newly appointed foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, fell into this lazy thinking within weeks of his appointment in 2016 when in reaction to a terrorist shooting in Munich where nine were killed, he assumed the attack was ‘in the name of Islam’, calling the attack a part of a ‘global cancer … incubated in the Middle East and around the world’.19 ‘The terrorist, Ali David Sonboly, turned out to be inspired by right-wing extremism, choosing the fifth anniversary of Anders Breivik’s far-right terrorist attack in Norway to inflict his carnage. Sonboly was proud of sharing a birthday with Hitler, rejected Islam, hated Turks and Arabs, was obsessed with violent computer games and had a history of being bullied and mental health issues.²⁰ Muslims love to debate what Muslims in the past invented. We like to think we’ve made a positive contribution to the world. And personally I’m thankful for their pioneering work which led to soap and the humble toothbrush. Life would be pretty awful without either, as it would be without their other great export, coffee.²¹ We Muslims, in classic Goodness Gracious Me style, like to take credit for a whole load of other stuff which is then disputed in endless papers, from algebra to astronomy and military marching bands to windmills. But one thing we can all agree on is that Muslims did not invent suicide bombing; that was the brainchild of the Japanese, with the missions of the Kamikaze pilots.²²

But if you read the papers, watch the news or follow politics either in the US or Europe you’d be forgiven for starting to believe that ‘Muslims are terrorists and they hate us.’ Let’s look at the evidence.

Polling by Pew shows that western Muslims are much more likely to have a positive attitude towards their Christian compatriots than vice versa.²³

British Muslims have a strong connection to feeling ‘British’,²⁴ have a greater trust in institutions such as the police and parliament than other Brits, are more likely to want to live in mixed communities and have a positive attitude towards other communities.²⁵

So no, ‘British Muslims’ do not hate us, and thus to try and use that as a basis of Islamophobia is not supported by evidence but is mere bigotry.

Sin number three is expressed by those who say, ‘I don’t hate Muslims per se, it’s when they follow Islam, a uniquely violent religion, that I object to them.’ It’s an argument presented as the basis for suggesting that the problem is not the people but the religion itself.

It’s an argument that crops up in many polls in the UK. One by COMRES in 2016 found that 43 per cent of people polled felt that Islam is a negative force in the UK, and 72 per cent agreed that most people in the UK have a negative view of Islam.26 The 2012 British Social Attitudes survey found that only one in four people in Britain felt positively about Islam, with 55 per cent of people saying they would be ‘bothered’ if a large mosque was built in their locality. A YouGov poll conducted in 2015 found that 55 per cent of people agreed with the statement ‘There is a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of British society.’²⁷ It’s an argument that has even found its way into House of Lords debates, where UKIP peer Lord Pearson has asked for a ‘national debate’ on verses within the Qur’an which can be interpreted to support violence. There is a vast array of theological writings, opinions and fully argued fatwas explaining ‘violent verses’ in the Qur’an which conclude that the use of violence is not justified in Islam, from the internationally published fatwa against terrorism by Tahir-ul-Qadri, who in a 500-plus-page document argues the legal, moral and religious case against terrorism justified in Islam, to the ruling of leading British Muslim scholars, to the ‘Open letter to Baghdadi’, the self-styled leader of the so called Islamic State, which condemned both IS and its barbaric conduct.²⁸

Just as ISIS are destructive individuals who draw religion close as a veil of respectability to justify their criminal behaviour, so too religious texts decontexualized and applied without reason make most religions appear bizarrely intolerant and violent at some point. As Madeleine Albright, the first woman in the history of the US to become secretary of state, said ‘Both the Bible and Qur’an contain enough to start a war and enough to ensure lasting peace.’²⁹

Anyone familiar with the main religions can find phrases in the ancient texts of these religions that aren’t appropriate to modern life. ‘An eye for an eye’ is the advice from Exodus. ‘If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife … both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death’ is what it says in Leviticus. And ‘The false prophets or dreamers who try to lead you astray must be put to death’ is what Deuteronomy says.

In 2015, two young Dutchmen conducted ‘street experiments’ in Holland called the Holy Qur’an Experiment in an attempt to show that the prejudice underpinning the view that Islam is uniquely violent is widespread.³⁰ It involved reading passages from the Bible but with a cover on it which said it was the Qur’an. The response was fascinating, with individuals responding to the passages on women’s roles, homosexuality and violence by repeating stereotypical negative views of Muslims before being told and realizing that they were in fact passages from the Bible. The experiment has been repeated all over the world with similar stark moments of realization and acknowledgement of prejudice. It’s one I would like to see politicians and media types take part in.

Now, even if we accept that our majority faith in Britain, Christianity, too, has the propensity based upon teachings within the Old and New Testament to be as violent as Islam,31 we Brits believe that we would never condone violence in the name of our faith. However, I’ve yet to hear a history teacher or politician condemn the religious basis of the violent Crusades. Indeed often those who campaign against this ‘violent religion of Islam’ also employ the language, images and paraphernalia of the Crusades.³²

No one faith has had a monopoly on mad, bad behaviour, and no one faith holds exclusive rights in the trade of terrorism, and yet, as Professor John Espsito at Georgetown University put it eloquently:

How come we keep on asking the same question [about violence in Islam] and don’t ask the same question about Christianity and Judaism? Jews and Christians have engaged in acts of violence. All of us have the transcendent and the dark side … We have our own theology of hate. In mainstream Christianity and Judaism, we tend to be intolerant; we adhere to an exclusivist theology, of us versus them.³³

Sin number four is a slightly tempered rational position. It’s explained like this. I know not all terrorists are Muslims and I know that not all Muslims are terrorists and I know Islam is not uniquely violent, but why is it that Muslims don’t condemn terrorists and say ‘not in my name’? We’ve all heard the argument, haven’t we? I’ve heard it from the far right and I’ve heard it from individuals whom I consider as friends. So let me explain.

Firstly, a terrorist act is bad news, to condemn a terrorist act is good news. Bad news makes good news and good news make no news. I hope you’re still with me. So when terrorist thugs go out and commit carnage, it makes news. There is an expectation that Muslims, whether practising or not, of all backgrounds, of all races, from all professions, need to vocally, vociferously and unequivocally condemn the acts. And they do.³⁴ Indeed, there are community activists and organizations who now maintain lengthy historical records of ‘Muslims condemning terrorism’ to refute the constant allegation that ‘Muslims don’t condemn’.³⁵

But the question I ask is this: why should they, ‘the Muslims’, feel obliged to, and why should they be vilified, as French Muslim Yasser Louati was by two CNN broadcasters, if they don’t?36

Allow me to talk you through the sequence of thoughts for ‘the Muslims’ when a terrorist act happens anywhere in the western world or where westerners are targets. I specifically say ‘western’ and ‘westerners’, because terrorist acts in places like Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, are usually of little interest to western media or indeed to us western politicians.³⁷ They are also of lesser interest to British Muslims, because we know we won’t be under any pressure to condemn them as those who are killed are not ‘us’ westerners. Here’s how it goes.

Breaking news – a terrorist act. Bloody hell, I hope it isn’t ‘the Muslims’. This thought kicks in even before ‘I wonder if any of my family were caught up in it’. If it is Muslims, is it in the West, or are westerners the target? If the answer is yes, then from here on starts the constant flow of Muslims being interviewed on radio and TV and providing quotes for journalists in the print media. Then there are local events, vigils, interfaith outreach initiatives, mosque invites to local communities, trust-building conversations on public transport with non-Muslims, specific conversation with work colleagues, all aimed at a very clear ‘not in my name’ message. We turn to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr – you name it, it is used to say loudly and clearly ‘not in my name’. It’s our phrase, special words for Muslims; we all know it, we all say it, we use the phrase so much we own it, we should copyright it. And just in case someone out there doesn’t hear it on radio or TV, doesn’t see it on the social network and doesn’t have a Muslim friend who gives them a personal rendition, we, the Muslims, have even resorted to taking out adverts in national newspapers to get the message out – paying for the privilege of saying ‘not in my name’.³⁸

And after this huge collective effort two things usually happen. Firstly, some halfwit, usually in a robe and beard, goes on TV and condones or refuses to condemn the terrorist act and in doing so becomes the ‘official voice of the Muslims’.³⁹ In a world made up of Celebrity Big Brother, Love Island and Made in Chelsea stars we shouldn’t be surprised that the ‘Muslim’ wannabe celebrities want their thirty seconds of fame too. Then secondly, some other halfwit with some poncey-sounding organization and posh accent will ask the question, ‘Why is it the Muslim community won’t condemn these acts?’ At which point thousands of British Muslims simultaneously scream at their screens, ‘We do.’

So, for ease of reference and for all future references when there will be a terrorist act, and sadly there is likely to be one, I condemn all terrorist acts done in the name of the religion I was born into. Although I have more in common with the good folk of Yorkshire than my co-religionists in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or Tunisia, I am still prepared to apologize on behalf of those who put the planes into the twin towers, the bombs on the Underground and the bullets into sunbathers. They act as the criminals they are, with no regard for human life, and do not act on behalf of me or my faith. So once again: ‘not in my name’.

Now, having said this, I ask the following question. Why should I or anyone else be held responsible for the actions of my so-called co-religionists? Are Protestants in the UK accountable for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan? Are Christians accountable for the actions of terrorist Scott Roeder, for the Christian Right, for the killing of Dr George Tiller, who was shot in 2009, or for the US-based Army of God, who advocate violence? Did Nick Griffin, Tommy Robinson or for that matter Policy Exchange and the Henry Jackson Society do a tour of the TV studios repeating ‘not in my name’ after the carnage caused by Anders Breivik? Would we ever demand a statement from Britain’s Jews to apologize for the daily acts of violence, even murder, by the settlers in the occupied territories, and would Tony Blair ever write an opinion piece on how as a Christian he is appalled by the ideology that stems from his faith and is the basis of the conduct of the Lord’s Resistance Army?

This divisive identity politics is what has led to widespread persecution of minorities across the world. British Muslims are not Iran’s, Saudi Arabia’s or Pakistan’s Muslims, they are ours, just as Syria’s, Egypt’s and Iraq’s Christians are not ours, they are rightful citizens of the lands in which Christianity was first born and practised. Those who argue, when discussing refugees, that we should take Christians only are as distasteful as those Muslims who interpret the concept of community or ummah as being an exclusively Muslim place.

Either none of us is responsible for the actions of our co-religionists or all of us are. There cannot be one rule for Muslims and another for the rest of us. There is no greater bond of loyalty between Muslim co-religionists than there is between Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists or indeed any other religion. Brotherhood or indeed sisterhood stems from humanity and plays out in the form of the physical community in which you work, live and play. The concept of ‘ummah’, in Islam right from its early manifestations, means more than just Muslims. Terrorism is indiscriminate, that’s why it terrorizes. No single group is the victim and no single group is the aggressor, and the followers of no single faith are collectively responsible. The argument that ‘all Muslims’ are responsible is popular on the far right, groups such as the EDL or Britain First, for example. So you can see the irony when Britain First, an organization that Tommy Mair, the convicted killer of Jo Cox, was photographed campaigning with, argued that they should not all be held responsible for the actions of one individual.40

Sin number five, an even more sinister version of this argument that ‘the Muslims’ do not condemn the terrorists, is that ‘the Muslims’ condone terrorists.

It’s an argument that Prime Minister David Cameron felt necessary to make in a speech at a security conference in Bratislava in 2015.⁴¹ The speech was a wide-ranging one that covered the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the challenge to Europe of refugees and mass migration, European economies, NATO and the threat from terrorism. The threat from ISIS was but one aspect of the speech, and yet the ‘catchphrase’ that was written into the speech and specifically briefed to the media was about views on extremism that are ‘quietly condoned’.

The Daily Mail front-page headline ‘UK Muslims Helping Jihadis’ reporting this speech was very deliberate.⁴² It fed into creating an environment of distrust, one which suggested that the outright condemnation from British Muslims of ISIS was a lie, that Muslims were being deceptive, that the Muslims couldn’t be trusted to inform authorities if they became aware of would-be ISIS jihadists, and the Muslims were secretly pleased with their young being groomed by a terrorist group and lured halfway across the world to sure death. Again the stupidity of the suggestion would be comical if not so dangerous. The vision of hundreds of Muslim parents across the country sat cross-legged on the floor with conversations with their kids over pakoras and chai, suggesting that ISIS jihadi fighter was part of a list of career options alongside doctor, lawyer or accountant, makes for a good stand-up sketch. It was not befitting of a serious speech by a prime minister.⁴³

Many Muslim parents who in the past would have had the ‘sex, drugs and clubs’ pre-uni talk with their kids are now having the ‘preachers, cults and robes’ talk. It is our kids at risk.

This focus by the prime minister on potential ‘community complicity’ came just twenty-four hours after the then home secretary, Theresa May, had made a personal plea to wannabe Isis jihadists, saying that, by leaving Britain to join ISIS, ‘You will be subjecting yourself and your children to a life of war, famine and hardship. You will be hurting the families who brought you up and the friends who love and care for you,’ shows how conflicted the government’s policy-making was.44 The cheap headline once again damaged the government’s credibility on counter-terrorism and made the fight against terrorism that little bit harder.⁴⁵

Sin number six is one based on the policy of controlled immigration, an argument by the intellectual Islamophobe based on population growth and its impact on our local culture and environment. It’s what some commentators call the Islamization of Europe.

I am a firm believer in controlled immigration. I accept that we must control both our overall population and annual net migration. As well as ensuring that we meet our international obligations under the United Nations Conventions on the Status of Refugees and on Human Rights, we must be pragmatic and firm about migration. As the daughter of an immigrant and a Tory, I have no doubt that Britain must, as it has done in the past, remain open to the skills she needs alongside a firm and controlled immigration policy. Controls should be based on skills, professions, need and not religion. To suggest, as Trump does, that Muslim migration needs to be halted is institutionalized discrimination. To draw no distinction between a British doctor, a Syrian refugee, an Indian tech expert, a Canadian entrepreneur, an Egyptian diplomat, a Pakistani aid worker and an Al Qaeda operative is policy in the world of Trump; in the real world it’s simply bigotry.

‘Londonistan’ was a term coined by DGSE, the French Intelligence Agency in the 1990s, as a way to explain the view that ‘the Muslims are coming, they are out of control and attempting to take over’. They thought we in Britain were in denial of the attempt to Islamize Britain through terrorist violence and cultural creep. In retrospect they should have been looking at where France was going wrong with the way it accommodated, or rather didn’t accommodate, its own Muslim communities, the way it was running Provincialism Paris. Interestingly, however, the Londonistan view is shared by both Muslim and the non-Muslim extremists. Just as the likes of Pegida and the EDL believe in the theory of the ‘Islamization of Britain’, so it seems do the bully boys turned terrorists who once made up the now-banned group Al Muhajiroun. The suggestion by the likes of Siddhartha Dhar, a Hindu convert also known as Abu Rumaysah, and now believed to be an IS leader, that they will fly the flag of Islam over Buckingham Palace, Downing Street and even the White House46 would be comical if not for the current environment within which the debate takes place. How considerate of the excitable wannabe jihadis to keep the seats of power exactly in the same buildings as they are now after their takeover. The delusional, now-convicted extremist Anjum Choudry, of Al Muhajiroun, Islam 4 UK and poppy-burning fame, ‘believes that such a takeover is possible’.⁴⁷

Sadly this delusional view that the Muslims are taking over is not the preserve of the ignorant extremist. There is many a political commentator who bills himself as an expert who spouts similar nonsense, the famous Fox News interview with so-called ‘terrorism expert’ Steve Emmerson about Birmingham being a Muslim city that went viral being a case in point.⁴⁸

But is an ‘Islamic takeover’ possible? Let’s take a look at the facts

At the last census, in 2011, of a total population of 53 million Brits, 2.8 million, or 4.8 per cent, were Muslim. Nearly 60 per cent identified as Christians.⁴⁹ And yet in an annual poll by IPSOS MORI conducted since 2013, which asks the question ‘Out of every 100 people in Britain how many do you think are Christian? Are Muslim?’, Brits have consistently overestimated the number of Muslims in the UK and underestimated the number of Christians by a large margin, offering estimates of 15 to 24 per cent for Muslims and 34 to 39 per cent for Christians.⁵⁰

Could it be the case, though, that the ‘Muslims could multiply’ so fast that they could take over in the near future? This was an argument made by Anjum Choudhry, to ensure a takeover by 2020.⁵¹ It was also an argument made by Vincent Cooper, a journalist who cites his interests as ‘philosophy, maths and economics’, who claimed that ‘by the year 2050 … Britain will be a majority Muslim nation’.⁵²

It’s an argument roundly rubbished by Channel 4’s Fact Check, which finds that, while Muslim birth rates are higher, the gap between Muslim birth rates and birth rates among non-Muslim Britons will narrow over time, leaving less of a gap between respective birth rates in the future. So while the British Muslim population will certainly grow in number, they ‘wouldn’t bet on the British Muslim population ever topping 10 per cent, let alone 50 per cent.53

This argument of the ‘Muslim takeover’ moves from stupid to sinister when it seeps into more mainstream discourse, not in the clunky way of the BNP of flags over Buckingham Palace or the Queen in a burqa, but in a more sophisticated notion of the Muslims taking over by stealth, by entryism.

Entryism, the sixth sin of Islamophobia, is not a new concept. It is a term that has been used to describe Trotskyists, Marxists and communists throughout the 1900s and indeed even in modern-day Britain to discuss some aspects of Labour Party membership. Politicians, activists, lobbyists and even farmers have been accused of entryism, the practice of entering organizations and over time from the inside using the levers of power to implement a system more favourable to themselves. The theory is that the entryists engage in a long-term plan in which they work within an organization for decades with the ambition of gaining influence, power and perhaps even control.

It’s a term which has been used to describe British Muslims, initially in more subtle tones and recently more overtly.

In July 2007, when I was appointed to the House of Lords and to the shadow cabinet as minister for communities, Conservative Home, a centre-right website run at the time by Iain Duncan-Smith’s ex chief of staff Tim Montgomerie reproduced an article written by conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Niles Gardner for the Heritage Foundation which argued that my appointment sent ‘the wrong signal at a time when Britain is fighting a global war against Islamic terrorism’. The article referred, amongst other things, to my opposition to the war in Iraq and described my demand of an apology from Blair as an ‘extraordinary statement’. After Chilcott my statements are perhaps anything but ‘extraordinary’.

The argument that British Muslims take up positions of authority and influence to implement some alternative agenda started as a view favoured by the right-wing press and neo-conservative commentators, but in 2015 became part of government policy. The Counter Extremism Strategy published by the newly elected Conservative government states as one of its aims: ‘We will therefore carry out a full review to ensure all institutions are safeguarded from the risk posed by entryism’,⁵⁴ which the paper defines as the practice ‘when extremist individuals, groups and organisations consciously seek to gain positions of influence to better enable them to promote their own extremist agendas’. This policy response was as a result of the so-called Trojan Horse saga, the name given to an investigation into Birmingham schools in 2014 at the time when Michael Gove was secretary of state for education. The investigation was triggered by a ‘leaked letter’, now widely accepted as a fake or forgery, which purported to be a plot by Muslim terrorists to ‘take over’ state schools through the appointment of teachers and governors. Birmingham City Council and Ofsted decided to investigate matters, and former Labour cabinet minister Liam Byrne ‘patiently tried to get to the bottom of what was going on’, but, not content with this, Michael Gove ‘put the school in the national headlines’ and appointed Peter Clarke, a former senior Met officer and ex-head of Counter Terrorism Command, to head up the investigation.55 Clarke’s job was to investigate and present an analysis of ‘evidence of extremist infiltration in … schools’, the suggestion being that this was a terrorism issue, a police matter, despite Midland Police saying there was no case for them to investigate.⁵⁶

The report duly found no ‘evidence of terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism in the schools of concern in Birmingham’, but said that there was ‘evidence that there are a number of people, associated with each other and in positions of influence in schools and governing bodies, who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views.’⁵⁷

In a nutshell, a bunch of blokes with pretty misogynistic, conservative and intolerant views had decided they were right and everyone else was wrong, that their vision of the world was going to trump others and through the brown boys network had managed to keep power in the hands of themselves and their mates. I’m sure many a political party, including mine, could be accused of this.

Those with intolerant views should not be responsible for the care of our children. But I disagree with how this incident was used to lead a widespread change to policy, including the placing of the much-discredited and toxic policy of Prevent on a statutory footing. The handling of the Trojan Horse affair has led to the vague and now much-questioned policy of teaching British values and has had a general chilling effect on the numbers of British Muslims who are prepared to put their head above the parapet and take part in civil society organizations and bodies. Many a successful professional British Muslim who has much to offer their local communities has spoken to me about the fear of ‘getting involved’ and ‘speaking out’, including in politics.

Accusations of entryism have been made by politicians, commentators and journalists such as Andrew Gilligan of the Telegraph.58 It’s a charge which has been levelled at many activists, campaigners and indeed even elected politicians in Britain who are from the Muslim faith. It’s a charge levelled by Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin and thankfully roundly condemned even by members of his own party.⁵⁹

It’s a charge Andrew Gilligan levelled at me.⁶⁰ In the now well-known ‘nudge-nudge wink-wink’ style of journalism, Gilligan suggested that I facilitated the entry of ‘Islamic radicals’ at the heart of Westminster, a suggestion that led to the headline ‘Colossal Conspiracy in Whitehall as Sayeeda Warsi’s Aftermath Assessed’ and an accusation that I had ‘crammed’ my government department with ‘the most disgustingly fanatical Islamic zealots who are trying to allow dangerous scum into our country and achieve other uncivilised goals’.⁶¹ It was a charge specifically levelled at me for an initiative I set up to tackle anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia.

What, you may ask, was so worrying about such an anti-hate initiative that it led to an accusation of ‘entryism’? What was so wrong about convincing government to take hatred and attacks against Muslims seriously? Why would anyone, least of all a government minister, consider doing it clandestinely? Why would it even be seen as negative? And why, in 2010, did I need to make it a priority?

The answer to these questions is rooted in history which I lay out in Appendix 2.

But essentially in 2011 I asked the prime minister to set up a cross-government working group on anti-Muslim hatred as a mirror image to the cross-government working group on anti-Semitism, and after much discussion and argument he agreed.

Choosing the community representatives on this group proved almost impossible. Practically any known activist within the Muslim community was considered by the Conservative members of the Coalition government as beyond the pale. It left me a very small pool of ‘Muslim talent’ from which to make appointments. It is the setting-up of this group and the appointment of its members that Gilligan cites as ‘entryism’. A group set up in response to a real and pressing issue in which government seemed uninterested, which the media, in response to my speech in 2011 ‘Islamophobia Has Passed the Dinner Table Test’, failed to acknowledge existed, which had little parliamentary support, which affected Britain’s largest minority was, according to Gilligan, the practice of entryism.

The undertone to charges of entryism are that ‘the Muslims’ ‘have an agenda which is not the same as Britain’s agenda, that ‘the Muslims’ are like the Catholics of bygone years, who were held to be loyal to a papacy overseas, that their loyalty is in question, and that ‘the Muslim’ politician cannot be trusted. This suggestion of disloyalty is not new: whether it was the Catholics in Britain or Jews on mainland Europe, both have in the past not been ‘trusted’. Indeed, specific laws were made to restrict Catholic rights and more recently Jewish rights; 1930s Europe saw laws on overcrowding in schools passed to expel Jewish kids from schools; laws which expelled Jews from the armed forces, the civil service and the judiciary; laws which excluded Jews from working in healthcare, charities and the media; and laws which took away citizenship. The Jews could not be trusted, and in parts of 1930s Europe measures were taken to make sure that they never got their hands on any lever of authority.62 The Jews of Europe, then, like the Muslims of Europe now,⁶³ were increasingly seen as fifth columnists, subversive agents, an undermining influence, sabotaging the national solidarity, the enemy within.

This term, ‘the enemy within’, was originally used in 1930s Spain to describe Franco sympathizers in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, the side which many English and Irish Catholics both sympathized with and supported. It was a term used by UKIP in the 2015 General Election to describe Muslims, with Nigel Farage arguing there is ‘an increasing level of concern because people do see a fifth column living within our country, who hate us and want to kill us’,⁶⁴ and more recently utilized in the Tory London mayoral election campaign.

So we are in a situation where Muslims who engage with politics or any other British institution are to be viewed as suspicious, and Muslims who don’t engage and keep themselves to themselves are to be treated as suspicious for being separatist and disengaged from mainstream society. In polite terms, it’s a lose-lose situation or, as Ian Birrell, former adviser and speechwriter to David Cameron and award-winning columnist and foreign correspondent, writes, ‘whatever they do, Muslims can’t win in our society’.65

The ‘fifth columnists’ theory could be dismissed as the crazy conspiratorial talk of the far right when it comes from the likes of UKIP, but once it starts to receive mainstream traction, then it becomes dangerous, intellectualized bigotry. It should worry us all when the lazy stereotyping of a community is couched in the argument that ‘phobia’ about Muslims is nothing to do with terrorists or terrorism but simply that Muslims aren’t compatible with Britain because ‘their’ values fundamentally differ from ‘ours’; that they are the ‘others’, an argument most recently made by Trevor Phillips, the ex-chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, in his documentary What Do British Muslims Really Think? I dealt with this in detail in chapter 2.

The documentary was yet another step in the ‘othering’ of British Muslims.

And that brings me to the seventh sin, the seventh form of Islamophobia. We judge ‘the Muslims’ by a higher standard than we would other fellow Brits. Consider issues such as homophobia, women’s rights, the practice of segregation and the recent high-profile cases of grooming of children in northern cities. These are all individually serious issues which are present in most of Britain’s communities. And yet they are all issues that have regularly been used as a stick with which to beat ‘the Muslims’. The fact that misogyny is not the preserve of Muslim men – indeed I saw it displayed around the top decision-making table in the land in cabinet – and the fact that most crimes of child sex exploitation in Britain are committed by white men, and that revelations in the last few years have exposed politicians, celebrities and highly respected members of the Catholic Church as paedophiles does not seem to get in the way of some good old-fashioned bigotry.⁶⁶

We are now over a decade on from 7/7, when the debate on ‘the Muslim problem’ first started to take shape in the UK. As I explored in chapter 4, the analysis of the ‘Muslim problem’ has changed over the years. It started with the view that a few of ‘them’ are terrorists and violent extremists because they are inspired by verses from the Qur’an which they pervert in interpretation. Commentators and politicians were keen to stress that the religion of Islam was inherently peaceful. Over time this ‘individual perverted interpretation’ theory became a ‘group perverted interpretation’ theory, which was discussed in academic circles as an ideology, Islamism.

Over time the academic term ‘Islamism’ crept into mainstream use with very little understanding of its history or context or breadth of interpretation. It became a favourite of Tony Blair and subsequently the Conservative Party too. It became so popular that even our friend Tommy Robinson, of ex-EDL fame, started using it following his 2013 ‘Quilliam, I’ve seen the light’ moment, preferring it over his colleagues’ term ‘Muslamics’.

But even at this stage in the ‘problem-solving journey’ the general underlying theory was that some Muslims used Islam as a justification to commit violent acts of terrorism, the key word being violent.

The argument, however, then developed to say that, although only a small number of Muslims were violent and extreme, many more Muslims had views that were non-violent and extreme. This widening of the net of ‘the problematic Muslims’ was promoted in 2006 by Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7, where he described this ‘non-violent extremism’ as the swamp within which extremists feed, and he argued that to deal with the terrorists and the violent extremists we needed to drain the swamp. It’s a definition Gove fought for and succeeded in making Conservative policy.67

This widening of the definition to non-violent extremism troubles me, and it ‘alarms’ the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.⁶⁸ It doesn’t sufficiently draw a distinction between conservative religious practices, which are present in all faiths, and intolerant views that religious types seek to impose upon others. It fails to appropriately balance our great British commitment to freedom of speech, belief, thought and conscience and security. It fails to focus on non-religion-based extremism. It fails to focus on communities other than ‘the Muslims’.

And with increasing counter-terrorism measures targeting not the violent extremists but the broader community, this definition simply feeds, not drains, the swamp.

And finally we’ve moved on from our concerns about Muslims who are non-violent extremists to ‘the Muslims’ full stop, who, according to Trevor Phillips and others, simply do not think like ‘us’ and ‘never will’. In other words they, ‘the Muslims’ are all part of the problem and will always remain so.

This is the dangerous point the debate has now reached. An approach that set out to unite us all against those who want to do ‘us’ harm through terrorism has become a policy that’s pushing Britain’s Muslim communities to the fringe. A policy aimed at terrorists has become a policy aimed at Muslims.

Six years on from my first keynote speech on Islamophobia, the only one to date by a national politician, government policy-making on Islamophobia has made little progress. I introduced a section on anti-Muslim hatred alongside anti-Semitism and racism in our annual Human Rights Report in 2012, which, amongst other areas, reports on equality and discrimination issues, and yet in 2015 the sub-section on anti-Muslim hatred didn’t appear, despite the ramping-up of anti-Muslim prejudice and hostility in global affairs.69 There has been little funding for work combating Islamophobia, little political interest in the issue, little enthusiasm to treating it as seriously as anti-Semitism or racism, and all the while, the list of acceptable, intellectualized reasons for why it’s OK to dislike the Muslims continues to grow; the media headlines about Muslims are as vitriolic as they are misleading; the kind that would not be used for any other community; political discourse on Muslims is inflammatory; and ordinary lives, especially those of children, are blighted by the daily occurrence that Islamophobia has now become. This situation led to a damning indictment last year in a report from the Council of Europe, which described the situation for Muslims in the UK as an

intolerant political discourse … Muslims are portrayed in a negative light by certain politicians and as a result of some policies. Their alleged lack of integration and opposition to ‘fundamental British values’ is a common theme, adding to a climate of mistrust and fear of Muslims. The counterterrorism strategy, Prevent, may fuel discrimination against Muslims … Hate speech in some traditional media, particularly tabloid newspapers, continues to be a problem, with biased or ill-founded information disseminated about vulnerable groups, which may contribute to perpetuating stereotypes.⁷⁰

The dislike of all things Muslim is no longer a fringe practice. Nobel prize-winning democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi was caught making Islamophobic comments about award-winning broadcaster Mishal Husain when she assumed she was off air after a BBC radio interview.⁷¹ Nicky Campbell, presenter of The Big Question, received a barrage of abuse for a cheeky ‘Inshallah’ on signing off the show one weekend.⁷² Hollywood heartthrob Riz Ahmed of Bourne and Star Wars fame is still profiled at airports.73 And even our Bake-off heroine Nadiya Hussain has spoken out against the everyday anti-Muslim prejudice she faces.⁷⁴

The fact that as a country we have allowed this scourge of Islamophobia to grow should worry us all.

For over a decade mistakes have been made which have not only made the fight against terrorism harder but also negatively shaped the story of Muslim Britain.

Part two of this book paints a bleak picture of the relationship between Britain and her Muslims. It’s this gloomy outlook which leads me to wonder whether the country that both my grandfathers fought for, a country I had the privilege of serving at the highest table in the land, is a country that my grandchildren will call their home.

Part three will outline how things can be different.