Mick Hartley

Sonia Sodha in the Times makes an effort to find some middle ground on Islam in the UK – Left and right are misreading Muslim Britain.

The right is increasingly turning British Muslims into a lightning rod by conflating Islam with the political ideology of Islamism, which seeks the state imposition of sharia. And the Labour government has just adopted an official definition of anti-Muslim hostility that is unnecessary (people of all faiths are already protected under existing law) and will have a chilling impact on people’s ability to talk about the above issues, in a world in which the Crown Prosecution Service unsuccessfully pursued a criminal case all the way to the High Court against a Turkish man who burnt the Quran as a political protest, and a Batley schoolteacher has had to remain in hiding since 2021 after he showed a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad to his class.

A brave effort, but it would be good to have some clearcut idea of how Islamism differs from Islam. Or to hear some brave Muslims speaking out against the hard-line Islamists.

The unfortunate truth is that Islam is openly supremacist and inflexible, and has, historically, imposed its vision – essentially that of a 7th century Arabian warlord – by force and by fear rather than by reason and persuasion.