As the population of Christians in the United Kingdom (UK) plummets to below 50 percent and Britain’s Muslim population rises to almost 7 percent, the country grapples with major demographic changes. Nearly 20 percent of the crimes in the UK are committed by Muslims and England has been struggling with grooming gangs and “honour” killings for decades. Yet, the fear of being labelled Islamophobic, as well as Muslims comprising a small but stable vote-bank for the Labour Party ensures that political rhetoric in the nation remains incapable of calling out cultural issues bordering on inhumaneness.
One of the most horrific cases of honour killings that modern England turned a blind eye to happened in 2006 when Banaz Mahmod was brutally killed after a life of abuse. Starting with female genital mutilation, physical abuse, rapes, forced hijab, forced marriage and beatings, she was subject to much of it under the complacent gaze of their police. While Banaz gave multiple statements to the police that her father had planned and threatened to kill her, she was sent back to her family home, even from the hospital where she was treated after an initial attempt on her life. In the end, she was subjected to hours of rape and torture by cousins and relatives before being strangled with a ligature in her South London home. Her body was transported in a suitcase and buried in a garden before her death was investigated.
Considering how institutions have forgotten Banaz and the many victims of targeted killings of Muslim women by their families in the UK, one might be forgiven for thinking that hers was a rare case. Unfortunately, there exists a list of brutally similar deaths, all under the eye of British police and hospitals. With the same complacency repeated so often, a concerned citizen might wonder if institutions were complicit in murders and rapes.
The fear of calling out violent crimes committed by Muslims in the UK allowed the grooming gangs of Rotherham to fly well under the radar, for years! Numerous non-Muslim children were targeted for sexual exploitation by mostly British-Pakistani men in Rotherham. The complaints of their parents fell on many deaf years before the desperate pleas became too numerous to brush away. Yet, even that taint seems to have faded quickly enough with the news cycle favouring donations to the city, rather than an investigative follow-up. No one has looked into the mental health of the victims of one of the most massive sexual exploitation campaigns to rock the nation, affecting over 1,400 children. In a disconcertingly disgusting twist of politics, the city is set to be named Children’s Capital of Culture!
When it comes to Sharia and its governance of women under Islam, the rhetoric of freedom espoused by the British commentariat switches to a Sharia-compliant acceptance of all atrocities they bear. Polygamy is normalised within British Muslim families, as is abuse, all of which is brushed away as being part of a misunderstood culture. The exoticisation and infantilisation of a non-assimilative population is absolutely accepted. The journalistic, academic, political and media circles are complicit, ensuring that the colonial gaze of the British on non-white people does not hold other humans to standards of living equal to their own, even if it means that women and children are third-class citizens.
Creating icons out of the few that fight their way through the systemic impositions of their culture into universities and beyond, the media uses them as mouthpieces. The intellectual cover provided by those who have escaped some prejudices while continuing to support the ideology that imposed said challenges is a ploy perfected by sections of the media and academia. Wasiq Wasiq, a highly regarded UK-based academic, bucks this trend. As a devout Muslim who calls the UK home, he has long researched Islamism and terrorism and has often noted the phenomenon of brushing Islamist violence under the carpet.
When asked why Islamists hold so much sway over the coverage of violent crimes when it regards Muslim culprits, Wasiq said, “Islamism has long been a staple within British society. It reared its ugly head in the 1980s following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses when Muslims took to the streets to protest and cause vandalism. This resulted in the government seeking to mainstream Islamist groups to moderate Muslims, under the misguided belief that they could only be controlled from within their own community. This gave bad-faith actors a level of power they were not necessarily expecting. Since then, Islamist groups have sought to control how the government and media treat Muslims.”
He cited the example of the Prevent program, which is the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. “It has been labelled Islamophobic, despite Islamist extremists dominating terror statistics. Even using terms such as Islamism and Jihadi are labelled Islamophobic, which means that tackling Islamist extremism is becoming difficult because we are not able to name it accurately without being called racist. There is an inherent soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to Muslims and this needs to be corrected so that the government and the diverse Muslim community can tackle Islamist extremists effectively. Until then, we will continue to bury our heads in the sand and wish the problem away. But that simply isn’t going to happen!”
While the BBC did not feel compelled to hide the parts of England that were already governed by Sharia courts when they reported in 2012, that confidence has vanished completely. Articles talk about how such courts have “no jurisdiction” abound, and yet Sharia thrives in parts of the country. Still, the House of Commons has debated the Islamic Sharia Council’s legality even as recently as 2019, despite its establishment over 40 years ago.
The violence will likely continue to be ignored by mainstream media outlets, ensuring that the gaslighting of large swathes of the UK population can go on. Even as patterns of Islamist violence continue, citizens continue to fear being called racist for calling it out. The Leicester riots in 2022 proved to be a masterclass in such whitewashing. As Muslim mobs gathered to chant and harass Hindus in a culturally diverse area, Hindu groups gathered to protest the unrest and the attacks. While Leicester police tried to clear the air, rumours about “Hindutva terrorism” fueled malicious narrative creation.
Contrast this with France which seems to have had enough of the dog-whistling to Islamophobia. Calling out violence for explicitly religious reasons is difficult across Europe, and yet the French government as well as certain journalists have refused to cave in to offer soft bigotry as a solution for hard violence. The British state, instead, follows the narrative lines of the far-left extremist organisations that fuel their selective coverage at the cost of citizens’ lives.
While violent crime raises its ugly head every day, the unspoken crimes against Muslim women on British soil continue unabated. It will take years to undo the damage wrought by such malfeasance, and yet, it is set to continue. People-led movements and political support for change are the way out, but will the British people wake up and smell the tea, or will the fear of a label continue to loom larger than the threat of organised and unorganised violence?
Sagorika Sinha is a columnist and podcaster with Masters in Biotechnology from the University of Bath. Views expressed are personal.
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