According to an Ipsos-Mori survey, in the United Kingdom, the country where the Anglican religion was bornthe number of people who identify as Christians fell from 71% in 2001 to 46% in 2021. At the same time, those who defined themselves as “Muslims” increased 4.9% (2.7 million) in 2011 to the 6.5% (3.9 million) of the population in 2021.
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And in the vicinity of the general elections on July 4, the data also begins to have an electoral impact with a growing number of Islamists in public positions.
Religious divisions sharpened after the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinians last October, with many denouncing such clashes as a threat to British values of acceptance of diversity and integration.
Dr Parveen Akhtar, from the Department of Politics, History and International Relations (PHIR) at Aston University, Birmingham, said: “Cases of Islamophobia and also anti-Semitism increased after the October 7 attack by the Hamas terrorist group in Israel.”
Robin Simcox, Commissioner for Countering Extremism at the UK Home Office, denounced last March that the London mayor’s office had allowed, during protests over the war in Gaza, “The city becomes a forbidden zone for Jews every weekend.” For his part, the number two of the Conservative Party, legislator Lee Anderson, also stated that “the Islamists took control of London… and Mayor Sadiq Khan.”
On the same protests against the war in Gaza, journalist Melanie Philips, author of the book Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, warned that “The West is showing itself vulnerable to Islamic radicalism. “Europe is witnessing a call from Muslims for a global jihad and the authorities are still wrong to not take it seriously.” In this climate of tension, Islamists and Jews denounce increasing attacks on their communities.
As the leading agency monitoring hate crimes against Islamists, Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) recorded more than two thousand cases against Muslims in the four months following the deadly terror attacks last October. This is the highest number of cases recorded in four months, since Tell MAMA was founded in 2011.
Anti-Semitic incidents reached a record level last year, according to figures from the Community Security Trust (CST), the Jewish non-governmental organization that monitors these attacks. The registry reported 4,103 incidents of anti-Jewish hate in 2023, up from 1,662 in 2022 and almost double the previous record of 2,255 in 2021.
Thus, experts estimate that, although statistically faith plays an increasingly less important role in personal and national identity, the growing number of Britons who see religious groups that practice a faith different from their own as a threat poses a huge challenge to Britain’s social cohesion in the future.
What then is national identity? What importance does religion and its customs have in it? At a time when mass immigration from nations without cultural ties is changing the profile of many countries, the question of identity worries nationalist groups, but is also debated by sociologists.
Another statistical fact that some see as a trend towards the future is that The average number of children per Muslim woman is three, compared to 1.8 for non-Muslim British women. In any case, demographers highlight the phenomenon that occurs in other European countries, where in successive generations of Islamic families the birth rate tends to equal that of the rest of the population.
Islam has a long history of presence in the United Kingdom, especially since the mid-19th century. As the British Empire grew, particularly in India, it came to rule territories with many Muslim inhabitants who migrated to the islands. Today, in the country where King Henry VIII started the Anglican Church in 1534, There are about 16,000 temples of that Christian denomination, 3,200 Catholic temples and 1,800 mosques.
Although the United Kingdom is not exactly among the countries with the highest levels of xenophobia or Islamophobia, when compared to other European nations, this growth began to be the focus of attention a few years ago due to the rise of isolationist groups among Islamic believers.
A 2020 report reported that “Muslim groups are creating nations within nations” in the West. But the most striking thing is who signed that report: the former head of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips.
This Labor leader obviously did not criticize Islam itselfbut he spoke out against those Muslims who have very different values from the rest of society and want to lead separate lives. In that sense, Phillips advocated for close monitoring of ethnic minority populations in housing estates, to prevent them from becoming “ghetto towns”. In fact, he was in favour of setting maximum percentages of ethnic minorities in schools to promote racial integration.
Phillips’ statements became relevant because he himself, when he chaired the commission that fights for equality in the United Kingdom, between 2003 and 2012, He was one of the first to denounce the risks of “Islamophobia.” “Twenty years ago, when I published the report titled ‘Islamophobia: a challenge for us all’, we thought that the real threat behind the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims,” he wrote in his most recent text.
But he complained that today “a significant minority of Britain’s four million Muslims regard us Britons as a nation of such low morals that they would prefer to live separately from their non-Muslim compatriots, preferably under Sharia law (…). There is a life and death struggle for the soul of British Islam, And this is not a battle the rest of us can afford to ignore. We need to take sides,” he said.
This last text meant Phillips was temporarily expelled from the Labor Party for more than a year. He was later reinstated, although he never retracted his statements. This debate takes place in a country with a recognized respect for diversity: the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Hindu religion, and since 2016 the popular mayor of London, the capital and most populated city of the kingdom, Sadiq Khan, is precisely Islamic.
When he was running for office, Khan even warned his campaign about the positive impact it could have At that time, his triumph came some ten years after the bloody attack in 2005 that left 56 dead in the city’s subway. and was claimed by Islamic groups. He said in 2016: “What kind of message would be sent to the world if Londoners had the confidence, tolerance and respect to vote for someone of a different faith to the majority of them? “I’m a Londoner first and foremost, but that would show the haters what kind of country we are: a beacon.”
In the last municipal elections last May, the Islamic leader Shahin Ashraf was also elected by her fellow councilors in an indirect vote as the new mayor of the municipality of Solihull, in the West Midlands, England. “The fact that Shahin wears a hijab means that she is easily recognized for her faith, but that does not define her”said Greens group leader Max McLoughlin, in nominating Ashraf.
Lubna Arshad had already made history last year in Oxford (England) as the first mayor of that city who was of color, Islamic and the youngest to take office.
National identity
But sociologists then debate what values make up a country’s national identity and what weight religion has.National identity is not a constant. Evolve and change over time. For example, religion may play a central role in national identity at one time and be significantly less important at another time,” said British doctor Parveen Akhtar.
“The United Kingdom is a Christian country, where the monarch, King Charles, is also the head of the Church of England. However, if you look at the census data, less than half of the population described themselves as Christian, and The percentage of people who do not identify with any religion has increased from 25% in 2011 to 37% in 2021. So, the trend suggests that the number of Britons for whom religion is not a significant part of their personal or national identity is growing,” the political scientist added.< /p>
The great danger that the Islamic community sees is the frequent association of its religion, one of the three great monotheistic creeds, with violent and isolationist groups, a phenomenon that had not occurred in the United Kingdom when Catholic separatists and Protestant unionists carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks during the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.
The truth is Within Islam there are minorities of Salafism and Wahhabism that in many cases seek to replace the British State with a caliphate. –which is why, for example, the group Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in the United Kingdom last January–, which does not identify itself as British.
RUBEN GUILLEMÍ
LA NACION (ARGENTINA) – GDA
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