Britain’s journey towards Islamic statehood

A reflection on two articles about how Islamism is transforming our society

For this second of what will now be three returns to articles I’ve written elsewhere, I’ll be looking at a couple of pieces, one for Unherd on Islamophobia and the other for The Critic on how Islamists are treating schools as a battleground to impose their religion.

1. ‘Islamophobia has always been a weapon’, Unherd, 7^th March 2025

Is Britain going to become an Islamic state? For me, there are many reasons to think: Yes, including the proliferation of Islamic Relief adverts in London this year telling us to ‘Trust in Allah’ and ‘Give Zakat’.

Photo from Shahrar Ali, here: https://x.com/ShahrarAli/status/1894389073055207887...

The career of the word ‘Islamophobia’ is another reason. My recent article for Unherd (which the title somewhat misrepresents as an origins story) approaches the term as a weapon or social technology. As I write, “In effect, it works as a form of linguistic laundering: converting religious authority into a general, all-consuming rationality and morality.”

The word after all is ‘Islamo-phobia’: so a phobia of Islam, an irrational fear of Islam. It regards any resistance to Islam as irrational by definition. The word therefore does not merely describe; it judges and brings us towards Islam by turning us against fear of and resistance to it.

From the Islamic perspective, Islam cannot be associated with bad things because it represents submission to a perfect God. All problems associated with Islam and Muslims therefore must originate outside Islam. For the more ideological sociologists and historians meanwhile, bad things in society necessarily have their root cause in Western culture, capitalism, Whiteness, colonialism, Englishness and the rest.

These two perspectives come together in what we might call Islamist sociology, which treats Islam as a force of progress in the world. Progressive ideology is particularly amenable to Islamists, for it conveys the idea that believers are on the right side of history. History is on their side. The world is moving in their direction. If you do not accept their version of truth, you will eventually lose.

I started the article with the role of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), an outpost of the Iranian government in Britain, in promoting the term: and I think you can see in that organisation’s name the same phenomenon: an invocation of ‘rights’ which, if contravened, justify resistance until they are restored.

Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, in their terrific book The Western Intellectual Tradition, write that the assertion from writers like Voltaire and Montesquieu that men enjoyed certain ‘natural rights’, which were above local custom and tradition, contained the seeds of universal revolution. The American Revolution was marked by the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Bill of Rights; the French Revolution by a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. I think it’s reasonably clear now that the notion of ‘Islamic Human Rights’ works to support an ongoing Islamic revolution in the West, as does the word ‘Islamophobia’.

And our elites, bound as they are into the system of diversity, defer to it all with hardly a thought, just a lot of words denouncing those who don’t (thereby de facto aligning to the Islamists). In defending what they see as decency, they leave the remnants of the liberal society prone to further erosion, unable to resist pressures that ultimately seek to capture and destroy it. I think this can be seen in virtually all areas of British society now: from the university to the local High Street.

2. The school as a battleground, The Critic, 29^th April 2024

One of the high profile instances in which Islamophobia has been deployed in recent times is the campaign against the banning of massed prayers in the playground of Michaela Community School (in north London), headed by the redoubtable Katharine Birbalsingh. As I suggested at the end of that piece, if an Islamophobia ‘definition’ is adopted by the authorities, as seems almost inevitable now, such an action by a school leader will become even more fraught with risk: and probably impossible.

This article looks at how Islamists are targeting schools, seeking to institutionalise rights of Islamic observance, therefore making those which are not already explicitly Islamic have Islamic characteristics, with associated privileges for Muslim community representatives. The Michaela campaign featured pressure on Muslim students, social media pressure, those ubiquitous accusations of Islamophobia, plus abuse of staff members, death threats and a bomb hoax. It culminated in a legal case, fought with £150,000 of legal aid (taxpayers) money.

As I wrote:

The fact that Islamists and their progressive allies are targeting Michaela, led by perhaps the strongest and certainly most high-profile headteacher in Britain, shows how emboldened they are. They are not going away: and government needs to come up with a strategy and tactics for dealing with them.

It was a bleak prognosis, even with a Conservative government in place that was reluctant to bend the knee to the activists. Now we have a Labour government that is desperate to retain Muslim votes in the face of significant pressure from ‘independent’ candidates standing on a pro-Gaza, anti-Israel ticket. As reflected in my Islamophobia article, the Islamists have developed extensive techniques and tactics to exploit this sort of thing. This delivers to them repeated victories – which is precisely the way they see their activities: as a form of warfare that they must win for the sake of God and the ummah. Their techniques repeatedly help them to hit back against their opponents, converting moments that might reflect badly on them (for example terrorist attacks committed in their name, or mass sexual exploitation of non-Muslim girls seen as having no human dignity) into instances of Muslim victimhood that necessitate giving Muslims and their religion special protections and privileges.

As those protections and privileges pass into institutional practice and law, as with the APPG Islamophobia definition widely adopted already across the public sphere, so Islam and Muslims become a privileged class – and so the society and state take on distinct Islamic characteristics; indeed it starts to appear as an Islamic state.

We are already quite far down that road. Those of us who believe in the free society need to step up, get active and organised to prevent what looks like an inevitable further progress.