A fault line within Britain’s community of four million Muslims is now widening. On one side are the majority who wish to integrate into a pluralistic British society, who support a Palestinian state, and see a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. On the other side are those who are less likely to observe such a distinction, and who view integration with suspicion, even revulsion.
This growing chasm, according to Sara Khan, a controversial figure in the British Muslim community, “defines the battle for British Islam” in 2024 and beyond.
Polling consistently shows that most British Muslims wish to integrate, support the police, and dislike Islamist radicalism. They have a proponent in this integrationist approach in the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He has turned reformer: dispensing with the clerics, whose influence on the royal family had been great, and releasing women from the most inhibiting restraints on their freedom and dress (although limits remain).
Bin Salman is no liberal; his alleged part in approving the murder in October 2018 of Saudi American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US-based critic of his rule, made him a pariah in the West, albeit briefly. However, he is determined to wean the Saudi economy away from its dependence on oil. He wants to show potential Western investors a more stable country with greater respect for human rights. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, he made it clear that he would recognise Israel’s right to exist.
The reformism of Bin Salman includes a message to the Muslim diaspora to accept the culture and obey the laws of the states to which they have moved. The former Saudi Justice Minister, Dr Mohammad bin Abdul Karim al-Issa, appointed general secretary of the Saudi-based Muslim World League, has been granted a mission to travel the world upholding Islam as a religion of peace while denouncing Islamism as a form of fundamentalism.
Al-Issa’s message is repeated consistently. It guarantees him a warm reception in the West: speaking to Policy Exchange, a centre-right think tank, in London in June, he dismissed Samuel Huntington’s claim that the world was divided into differing and at times hostile civilisations, saying that, “We are against the clash of civilisations. All peoples have their own culture, and we must respect that. When we have differences, that does not dictate we must be enemies.”
These principles are codified in a document authored by Al-Issa, the Makkah Charter, a “pan-Islamic set of principles which support and promote anti-extremism, religious and cultural diversity”. He has talked at length to Pope Francis in the Vatican; has visited Marine Le Pen; and, in January 2020, he visited Auschwitz, prostrating himself on the freezing ground with others of his party.
Though a welcome message to many British Muslims, these initiatives provoke scorn from those in Islam who see Bin Salman and Al-Issa as betraying the necessary aggression against Israel (especially as the Israeli army’s military operations in Gaza have led to thousands of civilian deaths), and as diluting a faith which should, as the Koran commands in some of its verses, be hostile to other faiths.
A member of the UK-based Cage Institute, Rayan Freschi, wrote in April 2023 that under Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia “is beset by an aggressive imposition of liberal ideals” and that “what is left of the Islamic message” has been “stripped of the capacity for dissent… a message that consciously deforms Islam to achieve political goals”. Cage, founded by former Guantanamo prisoners, campaigns against what it views as “wars of terror” on Islam. In the UK, it focuses on alleged rule of law abuses taking place under the country’s counter-terrorism strategy – as in the Prevent programme, an early warning system against Islamist radicalisation.
What Freschi appears to miss is that there is a larger purpose in Al-Issa’s call to activism. His message is not simply one of social peace, it is also aimed at making Islam an accepted part of European and other western societies, and therefore more powerful.
The growth of political power is already evident – in the July general election, four independent MPs, who are Muslims, won their constituencies for the first time. They may attack the government on its support for Israel and its inability to force a pause in the campaign in Gaza – something that resonates with the Muslim population and is capable of turning moderates, at least temporarily, into radicals, especially if young.
The anti-extremist project has probably done little to convince those who see in British society a large and growing temper of Islamophobia. Moazzam Begg is a prominent member of those detecting an Islamophobic surge: he served time in Guantanamo, released on the prompting of the UK government, when no charges had been made against him. Begg told me that the fact that large numbers assumed the Southport murderer of three young children in July was a Muslim is a result of a “perception widely put about [by] both Labour and Conservatives over the past two decades – that’s the part that I find frightening.”
The most experienced commentators on the radical element within UK Islam retain a bleak outlook. Sir John Jenkins, a former diplomat with decades of knowledge of the Muslim community, wrote in a 2017 essay, that Islamism is “the instrument of a Gramscian war of manoeuvre and sometimes a frontal assault designed to capture, secure and expand Islamist political space and eventually domination” and argues that the government “must resist any definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that inhibits public criticism of religious practices and traditions, including dress codes”. That definition is likely to be an issue soon: Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, is now considering a new definition of Islamophobia, likely to reflect pressure from Muslim leaders after the summer riots, protests in part directed against Islamism.
Sara Khan’s The Battle for British Islam (co-authored with Tony McMahon) is a thorough examination of the conflict within the Muslim communities, between those who believe Islam to be “reconcilable with pluralism and human rights” or to “hold religious and supremacist ideas over and above notions of equality and citizenship”. Khan’s work in the past decade for the government and for her NGO, Inspire, has continued to stress the attractiveness of Islamism to young Muslims who are angered by what they are told is a British society mired in racism, inimical to their faith and ethnicity, and indifferent to the fate of civilians in Israel’s drive to defang Hamas and Hezbollah.
The protests over the summer showed a deep division between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens, particularly in working-class areas. These tensions have been subdued, with heavy sentences imposed on some offenders. But few believe the underlying distrust has changed.
[See also: The Kremlin’s new calculus on Syria]
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