The UK has seen a significant surge in anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia in the year following the Israeli war on Gaza, according to a report released by a leading hate crime monitoring group.

Tell MAMA, a noted NGO that tracks hate crimes in Britain, recorded 4,971 incidents of anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia between Oct. 7, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024. The findings were revealed in a report on Monday.

Iman Atta, the organization’s director, described the alarming rise as unprecedented in the group’s history.

Since Oct. 7, Middle Eastern communities, regardless of faith, as well as visibly Muslim individuals, particularly women, have been increasingly targeted for their perceived support of Palestinian rights, Atta said.

These communities have endured verbal abuse, with people being called “terrorists,” and “Nazis,” in addition to facing threats, violence, and discrimination in public spaces, she added.

This growing hostility has not only threatened their sense of security but has also affected their social mobility, careers, and education, undermining their fundamental rights.

Abusive and threatening behavior

The report revealed that nearly two-thirds (63%) of the incidents involved abusive behavior, while 27% were categorized as threatening behavior.

Most of these cases were reported in major urban canters such as London, the Northwest, Yorkshire, and the Midlands.

The increase in anti-Muslim sentiment has left many questioning their safety and sense of belonging in the UK, especially amid rising far-right violence and incidents like the horrific stabbings in Southport.

Tell MAMA also emphasized that hate crimes remain severely underreported, with many victims becoming to daily abuse and choosing not to report incidents to the police.

The report warned that this rise in anti-Muslim hatred poses serious long-term risks to the economic and social well-being of Muslim communities in the UK, threatening community cohesion.

The NGO called on politicians, the media, and public institutions to take urgent action to address these challenges, counter harmful stereotypes, and prevent the normalization of narratives that link Muslim communities to violence and criminality.

Regional tensions have escalated due to Israel’s brutal offensive on Gaza, which has killed nearly 42,000 people, mostly women, and children, following a Hamas blitz last October.

The conflict spread to Lebanon with Israel launching deadly strikes across the country, which have killed more than 1,251 people and injured over 3,000 others since Sept. 23.

Source: TRT World

The Muslims in Britain Research Network (MBRN) was established by a group of academics in 1992 to encourage and promote the scholarly study of Muslims and Islam in Britain. Its main aims are to promote and share academic research in the field of British Muslim Studies and to build connections between academics, students, professionals, researchers, journalists and community members from all backgrounds with an interest in this subject.

MBRN typically holds two one-day conferences per year, along with occasional events for specialist groups such as early career academics in the field. Please follow our Events page for details and updates.

Research Spotlight

• Project: ‘Mapping Social Action by British Muslims’

There has been a recent turn from British Muslim charities and organizations to support local and national causes in the United Kingdom. In the last year alone, MCF recorded over three hundred Muslim-led organizations responding to the coronavirus crisis on both a local and nation-wide scale.

Moreover, the latest research conducted by MCF in early 2021 suggests that there has been a shift in Muslim public opinion towards contributing Zakat (obligatory alms) equally between the UK and overseas causes. No-one yet has attempted to map this vital sector within the UK thus there is no accurate portrayal of the British Muslim charity sector and the impact it is having on UK civil society.

Contacts

• Email: MuslimsinBritainRN@gmail.com
• Website: https://mbrn.org/

Author: Oliver Scharbrodt

Published in: Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Vol. 31, 2020, Issue 1, pp.23-40

Publisher: Routledge

Published online: July 24, 2019

Since the 1980s, the Borough of Brent, in north-west London, has been a major global hub of transnational Twelver Shiism. With the influx of Iraqi refugees, many clerical leaders of Twelver Shia Islam established their European headquarters in Brent, and, in addition to Damascus and Tehran, London became a major center of Iraqi diaspora politics during Saddam Hussein’s regime. The transnational networks and organizations based in Brent engage in an Islamic ‘transnational public space’, which Bowen defines as a globally operating discursive ‘field of Islamic reference and debate’. Based on ethnographic research in London, the article provides novel insights into the Twelver Shia Muslim organizational field in Britain and its engagement in ‘an alternative diasporic public sphere’ that articulates issues and contestations specific to Shia Muslims living in Britain: what does displacement and migration mean for Shia Muslims who have often escaped oppression, war and civil conflict; how do Shia Muslims in Britain define their relationship to Sunnis in the context of rising sectarianism in the post-Arab Spring Middle East; how do Shia Muslims position themselves towards Iran and its aspiration to be the political leader of global Shiism?

Source: Taylor & Francis Online

The study of Muslims in Britain has remained a major focus of the Centre’s academic interests. The work includes:

• Research and Publications: Priority is given to research which helps an understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing British Muslims, although some research projects expand the scope of the research to cover Muslims and Islam in Europe. The UK Housing Corporation and the British Academy have funded a number of research projects at the Centre. In 2015, Dr Asma Mustafa, Salahuddin Abdul Jawad Research Fellow, published a book on identity and political participation amongst British Muslims. This was followed in 2018 by the publication of her research on Muslims in the military. Professor Mark Halstead (former Azman Hashim Fellow, now Senior Associate member) has conducted research on ‘Muslim futures’ that explored the policy implications of the growing numbers of Muslim citizens in Western Europe. Professor Alison Shaw (Senior Associate member) has published a study of cousin marriages in the British Pakistani community.

• Seminars and Roundtables: Seminars, workshops and roundtables are regularly organized by the Centre on a range of topics relating to Muslims in Britain and Europe. A recent example includes a roundtable, in partnership with ISESCO, which looked at issues surrounding religious education curricula as well as Muslim children in state schools.

Other initiatives related to Muslims in Britain include:

Scholarships: The Centre offers up to 5 scholarships per year to British Muslim students to read for degrees at the University of Oxford. (Click for further details.)

YMLP: The Young Muslim Leadership Program (YMLP) is an intensive residential summer school open to Muslim men and women between the ages of 21 and 30. The aims of the program are to enable participants to become confident of their identity as Muslims living in the United Kingdom, to promote knowledge of the diversity of opportunities within British society, and to develop participants’ leadership skills. (Click for further details.)

Source: https://www.oxcis.ac.uk/muslims-britain

That a parliamentary group has finally recognized the scale of a problem that some Muslims themselves had first identified almost 30 years ago has to be welcome (my report on this subject “Race Relations and Muslims in Britain” was written in 1992).The APPG could hardly have denied the scale of the problem because prejudice and hatred of Islam and Muslims are the acceptable face of bigotry today, not just in Europe but globally, and has long been recognized by most fair-minded people and campaign groups. Comments by politicians and media reporting over the last few decades is testimony to that.

This APPG report also collated more evidence and explored academic works on the subject. Evidence is always welcome, but there comes a point when skirting around the issues must stop, and action has to replace evidence-gathering, and comfortable discussions for political purposes. However, a prerequisite to effective action requires dealing with the root causes of the problem, not identifying and trying to deal with the after-effects, which is effectively what this report has done.

Source: 5pillarsuk.com

Author: Oliver Scharbrodt, University of Birmingham

Published in: Journal of Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life (2018)

Published Online: November 8, 2018

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

Academic scholarship on Shia Muslim minorities in the West has described them as ‘a minority within a minority’ (Sachedina 1994: 3) or as ‘the other within the other’ (Takim 2009: 143), referring to a certain sense of double-marginalization of Shia Muslims in non-Muslim societal contexts. They need to undertake particular efforts to maintain both an Islamic as well as particular Shia identity in terms of communal activities and practices and public perception and recognition, responding to the rise of Islamophobia more generally and anti-Shia sectarianism more specifically. This article problematizes this notion of a double-marginalization of Shia minorities in the West as too simplistic.

The article investigates the dynamics around the creation of transnational Shia communal spaces in north-west London, the public representation of Shia Muslim identities by networks and organizations based there to illustrate their multilocal connectivities and internal heterogeneity. The article is based on research in the borough of Brent, north-west London, and presents novel insights into Shia spaces in Britain and thereby makes an important contribution to complexifying academic discourse on Muslims in Britain which has focussed on Sunni Muslims almost exclusively.

The ethnographic data is contextualized by providing background information on the historical and social formations of the networks and the centres examined in the article. To analyze the multilocal spatial manifestations and connections of these network, the article utilizes Werbner’s notion of ‘complex diasporas’ (2002, 2004, 2010) and recent contributions to the development of a spatial methodology in Religious Studies (Knott 2005; Vásquez 2010; Tweed 2006; McLoughlin and Zavos 2014). The article thereby constitutes the very first attempt to apply recent contributions on the nature of diasporic religions and their spatial multilocality to the case study of Twelver Shia networks based in London.

Read the full article HERE.

Source: Springer

Mosque-centered strategy will start next year in challenge to Home Office’s unpopular Prevent program. British Muslims are planning to set up their own program to stop people becoming terrorists in a direct challenge to the government’s controversial Prevent scheme, the Guardian has learned. The plans are being masterminded by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), representing 500 charities, schools and mosques, which plans to start the Muslim-run counter-radicalization scheme next year.

“In reflecting the wishes of a cross-section of British Muslim society, our affiliates have directed the MCB to explore a grassroots-led response to the challenge of terrorism. Real challenges exists, as we see with Muslim families broken up as a number of children, mothers and fathers leave to travel to Syria,” the MCB said in a statement.

The Home Office’s Prevent scheme is run by the police and security officials. The new initiative, run by a network of community groups across Britain, could cause concern as it could take people away from the official program. The number of referrals to Prevent reached a record 8,000 in the year to April 2016. Critics, many of whom are in the Muslim community, say Prevent has at its heart an ideological purity test meaning western foreign policy cannot be criticized, and the government is only prepared to work with those who do not challenge it.

Instead of trying to liberalize British Islam, the new scheme will focus solely on a message that violence can never be used. A source familiar with the plans said: “If we can get these voices more heard, they are anti-government and therefore more credible in saying do not turn to violence.” Mosques will be the key point of contact, being at the heart of Muslim communities across Britain. People can also be referred directly to the new counter-radicalization scheme.

Continue reading at: The Guardian