Emergency, which lately appeared in Indian cinemas, portrays the 21 months from June 1975 that Gandhi suspended the constitution and ruled the country by decree. Citing rising political violence, and long-standing tensions with Pakistan, the Premier’s actions have been deeply controversial ever since. But if you know anything about Kangana Ranaut, you shouldn’t expect subtlety alongside your popcorn. For beyond producing, directing and starring in Emergency, the 38 year old is also a member of parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

As a Hindu nationalist outfit, the BJP has always loathed Gandhi’s secular brand of politics. That’s clear enough from those billboards: Ranaut’s Indira practically snarls, a narcissistic demagogue as flames smolder ominously behind. Not that she’s alone. For decades, after all, politicians here have understood the immense power of the big screen, especially when so many Indians remain illiterate. Yet if Indira Gandhi’s own Indian National Congress exploited movies in the past, the BJP is doing something new, borrowing its links to the stars to dehumanize its foes — not just long-dead Gandhis, but many millions of Muslim citizens too, a strategy that could yet turn deadly.

Since independence, Indian politicians have reveled in the silver screen. The cinema of the Fifties and Sixties, the heyday of Congress rule, reflected Jawaharlal Nehru’s founding vision of socialist nation building. One classic example here is Ab Dilli Dur Nahi (“Now Delhi is Not Far Away”). Released in 1957, it follows a young boy who visits the capital to secure justice for his falsely imprisoned father, pleading his case to none other than Nehru himself. Other movies from this period invoke similar progressive pieties, lionizing ethnic minorities and assailing greedy landlords.

At the same time, Congress was happy to ban any movies it didn’t like. In 1975, for instance, it temporarily repressed Aandhi because it apparently drew on Gandhi’s relationship with her estranged husband. It’s a strategy that continued for as long as Congress was in power. In 2014, to give one example, it banned Kaum De Heere (“Gems of the Community”) because it allegedly glorified Gandhi’s killers. Gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards, in 1984, they claimed revenge for an attack by Indian troops on the Golden Temple, the most sacred shrine in Sikhism. Politically, if not ethically, such sensitivity makes sense. Indian politicians have for long understood that cinema can sway voters in their favor. Boasting a vibrant film industry even before independence from Britain, in 2023 the sector pulled in $1.3 billion, with the industry pumping out some 1,500 films a year.

Yet if Congress pulled the plug on films for political gain, and on releases they felt could spark communal strife, its BJP successors have embraced film far more aggressively. Over their decade dominating the country’s politics, indeed, what can only be described as Hindu nationalist propaganda has flooded Indian cinemas. It’s worth returning to Emergency here, with Ranaut using her film to effectively paraphrase Modi that Gandhi’s rule by decree “was a dark chapter” in the country’s history. Considering Gandhi used the Emergency to suppress a range of Hindu nationalist organizations, that antipathy makes sense.

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In truth, though, BJP-aligned films usually have a far bigger target in mind than the Gandhis: Muslims. It’s a history that runs deep. The BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), exists largely to undermine the Muslim presence in India, ever since its formation as a quasi-fascist organization back in 1925. Vinayak Savarkar, the group’s founder, carefully curated the idea of Indian freedom from the British Empire, even as he hoped to be free of Muslims too, envisaging a state where Hindus reigned supreme. Even today, leaders from both the BJP and RSS label Muslims as “terrorists” and “termites” — and just a few weeks ago, a BJP official in the southern state of Kerala told Muslims to “go to Pakistan” if they weren’t happy in India.

Certainly, these ideas are reflected in BJP-backed movies. A case in point is The Sabarmati Report. Released in November 2024, and produced tax-free after support by BJP officials, it covers an infamous 2002 pogrom in the northwestern state of Gujarat. The violence apparently started after an argument between Hindu pilgrims, returning from a shrine on the Sabarmati Express, and Muslim vendors at Godhra station. Even 22 years on, the details of what happened next remain murky. But what’s certain is that a fire started in one of the train’s carriages, killing 59, before vengeful Hindu mobs massacred over 1,000 random Muslims, raping and torturing as they went.

Watch the film, though, and you’ll get a rather different impression of what happened, with The Sabarmati Report bluntly blaming Muslims for the death of the pilgrims while ignoring the butchery that followed. Tellingly, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the slaughter — and was quick to praise the film, which earned almost 300 million Indian rupees. “It is good that this truth is coming out in a way that is accessible to everyone,” he wrote on X. “A fake narrative can only last so long — facts eventually prevail.” Statements like these unsurprisingly make India’s 170 million Muslims queasy, especially when Modi had the film screened at an auditorium in Parliament House, an event also featuring both the information and broadcasting minister and the defense minister.

And if victims and their families have little to cheer from The Sabarmati Report, films that cover the massacre more evenly have also been repressed. In January 2023, for instance, the BJP invoked emergency laws to block a BBC documentary examining Modi’s role during the riots. A month later, India’s Income Tax Department raided the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai, ultimately forcing the corporation to restructure its activities in the country. Feature films covering the pogrom have also faced legal challenges. That includes Kai Po Che, a 2013 movie that petitioners claimed unfairly blamed Hindus for the violence.

Nor, of course, is this simply a matter of a single film, or a single act of communal slaughter from many years ago. Rather, Modi and the BJP have developed close links with Bollywood to promote their jingoistic brand of Hinduism. As Kangana Ranaut hints, that begins with the stars themselves, with several backing the party in their public statements. And if it’s hard to know where ideology ends and professional expediency starts — Vicky Kaushal is just one of the actors to get big after playing a Hindu hero, with the rugged 36-year-old netting a National Film Award for his troubles — there are other links here too. That’s clear enough financially: several pro-BJP movies have received the same tax-free treatment as The Sabarmati Report. It helps, too, that Maharashtra, the home of Bollywood, is now under Hindu nationalist rule, with several stars recently attending the swearing-in ceremony of the state’s BJP president.

And if all this again speaks to the enduring power of cinema as a political tool in India, hardly surprising when 25% of people still can’t read and write, you equally get the sense that many films are best understood as telling one single story: Muslims are a danger to Indian life. One good example The Kashmir Files, which implausibly depicts the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Hindus as a genocide systematically arranged Kashmiri Muslims, even though many actually fought to protect their Hindu neighbors. Article 370 covers similar themes, while The Kerala Story feels even more crass. Depicting Muslims as brutes intent on smuggling vulnerable Hindu girls into ISIS slavery, the film’s marketing initially suggested 32,000 women had suffered such a fate — until complaints forced the filmmakers to clarify that the blockbuster only compiled the “true stories of three young girls”.

Like with The Sabarmati Report, meanwhile, these movies have explicitly received the Modi mark of approval. And if that’s another reason for ambitious directors to stay on side — a good word from him can see box office takes soar — filmmakers have delved deeper into history to make their politics clear. One good example is the 2020 film Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. Released during Modi’s second term, and set in the 17th century, it paints the subcontinent’s Muslim Mughal rulers as barbaric, bloodthirsty monsters, whose ultimate goal is the economic and political subjugation of Hindus.

Nor, of course, is cinema the only place that the BJP is flexing its anti-Muslim muscles. From its muzzling of journalists, to its lavish funding of friendly broadcasters, it’s little wonder Reporters Without Borders ranks India 159th for press freedom worldwide. The media, for its part, is happy to oblige its paymasters: in 2020 several Indian news channels blamed Muslims for Covid. Though they never questioned how the BJP’s faulty vaccine provision resulted in mounting deaths, they did promote conspiracy theories claiming Muslims were intentionally spreading the disease.

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Not, of course, that this matters simply for India’s spiraling international reputation. On the contrary, Modi’s usurpation of his country’s media is having a real-world impact on the safety of Muslims. In 2023 alone, India Hate Lab, a Washington DC-based group that documents hate speech against India’s religious minorities, recorded 668 hate speech examples targeting Muslims. Even more striking, there’s suggestive evidence that calumny against Muslims in the cinema can have a practical impact on the streets. Admittedly, the line between media and violence is hard to trace explicitly, but it’s surely telling that 59 cases of communal violence were reported in India last year, a significant rise on the 32 from 2023. Other links are even more explicit. After the release of The Kashmir Files, anti-Muslim videos soon went viral on WhatsApp, with one exhorting Hindus to shoot the “traitors” in their midst. Muslims themselves are clearly worried too, with one opposition politician comparing The Kashmir Files to Nazi propaganda.

Together with other ominous signs — an amendment to India’s citizenship act, coupled with a national register of citizens, may leave millions of Indian Muslims liable to detention and deportation — and the future looks bleak. That’s especially when you examine upcoming releases in Indian cinemas. One example is Chhava. Scheduled for release next month, it features a Hindu hero (once again) decimating evil Muslim kings. If only by comparison, Emergency almost feels balanced.

And so India’s culture wars wearily carry on, pitching liberal secularists against Hindu nationalists yet again. This particular battle has already claimed its first life in Maharashtra: a 40-year-old electrician died in a stone-pelting contest provoked by an Instagram post about the indie drama. Meanwhile, 20-somethings at a Jammu hostel pummelled one another into hospital beds, after one of them voiced the rather outré opinion that the film was “worth watching”.

It most certainly wasn’t. It’s 138 minutes of my life that I will not get back. Here is a production that falls into the dominant genre in contemporary Indian filmmaking: the deranged docudrama. Militarism and a muscular Hinduism, ChatGPT scriptwriting and CGI cinematography, combine in these epic fantasies of unblushing Modi-ana, as myriad villains get their comeuppance: Muslim militants in The Kashmir Files, Pakistanis in Uri: The Surgical Strike, opposition parties in The Accidental Prime Minister, and all three in the biopic, PM Narendra Modi.

In The Kerala Story, Muslim fundamentalists are once again the villains of the piece. The theme is “love jihad”, an oxymoronic term that refers to a conspiracy theory now ubiquitous in India. Lascivious Muslim men, so Modi’s publicists have it, are seducing unsuspecting Hindu women only in order to convert them and increase the number of Muslim babies. This is the Indian version of the Great Replacement Theory, pedalled by the ruling BJP. Muslims are conspiring to become a majority, the argument goes, in order to impose sharia rule on Hindus and, ultimately, obliterate Hinduism altogether.

The director Sudipto Sen’s sleight of hand is to weld love jihad with another Hindu nationalist bugbear: actual jihad. So, we find Shalini, the tragic heroine, abandoning her nursing degree to take up with a Muslim man, who carries her away to an Isis boot camp in the Afghan desert. Her fate as a suicide bomber destined for Syria seems sealed. But then — spoiler alert — a drone, the deus ex machina of our times, spots her. She is whisked away to a Gitmo-style military prison, where she spills the beans about a ginormous terror network set on converting and killing Hindus in their millions. So far, so trite. So why are liberals up in arms?

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Sen’s spurious statistics, together with the echolalia of the unthinking press, seem to be the main source of outrage. Shalini has it that 32,000 Hindu women from Kerala, all victims of “love jihad”, lie buried in the sands of Syria. In interviews, Sen has stood by that number. Maths clearly isn’t his forte. Only around 500 Hindus convert to Islam every year — generally not to become Isis fighters but, in the main, to marry outside their faith. (At its peak in 2017, Isis counted a mere 37 Keralite recruits and sympathisers, as a convincing database put together by Sara Perlangeli and Dhruva Jaishankar shows.) But liberals need not worry about Sen’s trouble with numbers — or, indeed, his trouble with Muslims. For as propaganda goes, The Kerala Story is piss-poor. If anything, it reflects worse on Hindus than Muslims.

In fact, what the film does is show why it is so easy to convert Hindus. The impetus for Shalini’s conversion betrays not so much the pull of Islam as the push of Hinduism. Flashbacks reveal a life of stifling domesticity and sexual harassment. Evidently, Hindu patriarchy didn’t have much to recommend it. The same goes for the individualistic vacuity of Hindu family life, an instructive contrast with the communal conviviality of its Muslim counterpart.

Shalini, admittedly, might be overreading things here. If Muslim families seemed closer to her, it is because, generally speaking, Muslims in India are poorer than Hindus, and richer Indians have a preference for nuclear over extended families. Likewise, if Hindu women — in her experience — were more likely to be pawed and groped in shopping malls, it is largely because they are more likely to come out of the confines of the home. Nevertheless, Shalini is smitten by the pedestrian theology of her pious Muslim roommate, Asifa. The naughty gods of Hinduism, about as craven and lustful as in the Greek epics, are no match for the pensive prophet. And when Asifa throws a hijab over Shalini’s head, ridding her of unwanted male attention, the good Hindu girl is lost. So utterly convinced is Shalini of Islam’s virtues that not even ludicrously grim jihadists gleefully cutting up bodies and dismembering women for wearing lipstick can shake her faith. That this is how Hindu nationalists choose to depict women — by turns credulous and treacherous — is revealing.

Something, one suspects, is rotten in the state of Hinduism. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit architect of India’s constitution, put his finger on it in 1956, the last year of his life. After decades spent trying to reform religion, it dawned on him that women and the lower orders got a raw deal not because of the corruptions of Hindu belief but rather because of Hindu belief itself. It was, above all, a doctrine of “graded inequality”, a social order held together by “an ascending scale of hatred and a downward scale of contempt”. There was no more to it. He converted to Buddhism, as do thousands of Dalits every year on the anniversary of his birth.

The Hindu obsession with conversion, then, speaks to a constant source of insecurity among its believers. The system works only so long as everyone accepts their station, which is why, when even a few leave the fold, it sets off a moral panic. During the colonial period, the threat stemmed from that adventitious agent of emancipation, Christianity. A vestigial fear of the faith remains central to Hindu nationalist thought today, church burnings being common enough in the eastern tracts of India. But over the past 100 years or so, it was instead Islam that frightened the living daylights of caste Hindus, as I argue in my book Another India.

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Indeed, the very origins of Modi’s BJP lie in the fear of conversion. Its parent organisation, the Sangh Parivar, was born in the Twenties out of panic about lower caste conversions to Islam and Christianity. Most spectacularly, in 1981, more or less coinciding with the birth of the BJP, an entire village of Dalits embraced Islam. Class politics in India always needs to find a religious register. At the outset, these Dalits had contemplated converting to Buddhism before deciding against it, Islam being the epitome of subalternity. The shock of Islam was designed to draw Delhi’s attention to the injustices of the caste system as well as the enormity of state neglect.

In response, Brahmins embraced proselytisation — historically alien to Hinduism. Missionary orders were set up and converts won in elaborate shuddhi — purification — ceremonies. More recently, Modi’s reign has been coeval with the Ghar Wapsi campaign, a concerted drive to, as it were, “return” converts back to the House of Hinduism. Christians and Muslims are won over, often under duress, to their “true” faith, their foreign-sounding names replaced with suitably Hindu ones.

The war against “love jihad” is of a piece with this vision. Starting in the late 2000s, Hindu nationalists set about cracking down on miscegenation. These days, marauding gangs break up mixed couples in ice-cream parlours, cinema halls, and even register offices, forestalling marriages in the nick of time. It’s an uphill struggle, but Hindu nationalists seem to be winning. Interfaith relationships are on the decline.

All the same, and perhaps counterintuitively, liberals ought to take comfort from films like The Kerala Story. Sure, it offends the viewer’s intelligence, but I’m not convinced that the film should be banned because it offends Muslims. For in carping about conversion, not least the effortlessness with which it is secured, Sen and his ilk are unwittingly making the case against Hindu hierarchy: exposing the very real factors that push people away from the nationalists’ faith, rather than confirming the conspiracy theory about Islamism. Here, then, is a truth about Hindu nationalism. It’s brutally effective when violently evangelised, but the minute it tries to persuade, its propaganda goes hopelessly awry.

When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”

In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.

As the grooming gang scandals erupting in the UK have shown, this permissive attitude towards CSA seems to be spreading. A new documentary by GBNews attempts to uncover why the abuse scandal in Rotherham — in which more than 1,500 underage, often impoverished, white girls were groomed and raped by gangs of Pakistani men — was allowed to go on for decades without the authorities intervening. One obvious reason is that these authorities were afraid of being seen as “racist” for focusing the investigation on the predominantly Pakistani men who are running these rings. But it’s equally important to recognise that these crimes were covered up by the Pakistani community itself, which allowed abusers to continue with impunity. The documentary shows how Pakistani-British policemen and Rotherham city councillors either tried to suppress reports about the scandal, or deny it was happening at all.

To reject the uncomfortable truth is the modus operandi in Pakistan, where more than 12 children are reported to be sexually abused every day. In the tight-knit, working-class communities where it’s most likely to take place, fear of bringing “shame” on the family is prioritised over safeguarding individuals, even if they’re children. A conservative attitude towards discussing topics of a sexual nature doesn’t help. A 2013 report by Save The Children offers an insight into how family dynamics play out when CSA is uncovered in Pakistan, where its prevalence “appears to be high”. Of the 99% of mothers in Pakistan who were aware of CSA, around one-fifth either considered children as compliant, or blamed them for the abuse. Confronted with the grizzly details of such crimes, it is common for Pakistanis to downplay their severity, with men often seeing it as “a part of life”, to use the report’s phrase.

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In Rahim’s family, when the eldest sister finally told their mother that an uncle had regularly raped three of the four children in the house, Rahim’s mother didn’t believe her, instead accusing her of “being hysterical and dramatic”. When her siblings insisted that the abuse was, in fact, happening, their mother finally confronted the uncle — but didn’t mention it to Rahim’s father, a marine engineer who was away from home for up to 10 months of the year. The uncle apologised, and the abuse stopped — but just for a few months. It was only when the uncle got married and moved out that the children’s five-year ordeal finally came to an end. By then, Rahim says, the eldest sister’s “problems started manifesting because of the trauma and she started rebelling”, eventually running away from home and telling the authorities about the abuse. When Rahim’s father was told, he didn’t believe any of it was true.

We have to recognise that these attitudes are cultural, if we are to understand what happened in Rotherham. Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation UK, has often commented on the over-representation of Pakistani men involved in grooming gangs in the West: “They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.” In communities where parents are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to “keep the peace”, it’s rare for anyone to stick their neck out to speak up for the rights of poor and vulnerable white girls, who are considered outsiders. The general attitude seems to be: those non-Muslim “white slags” had it coming.

Predators exploit the high-trust environment enjoyed by citizens in more developed nations, such as the UK and Canada. Girls outside the Pakistani community are more accessible to predators because they have greater social freedom; the most accessible are those without reliable carers. One of the eeriest moments in the documentary was when a victim of the grooming gangs described what happened to her as “normal”. The sexual abuse of young girls like her was so commonplace in these towns, they didn’t think it was unusual to be drugged, gang raped, and trafficked by young men who passed themselves off as the girls’ boyfriends. Is this what a multicultural society is supposed to tolerate under the guise of “social cohesion”?

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Unfortunately, the Pakistani community is still not ready to talk about CSA — a fact recognised by those few British Pakistanis who have spoken out against it. Shame and honour codes hold too much power, and those codes are hard to change. Shafiq, of The Ramadhan Foundation, notes that “for years some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand about these predatory grooming gangs”. When family members of perpetrators were interviewed, they described white girls as “filthy”, commenting on their clothing, and saying, “they have no shame, no fear of Allah”. When asked how she would feel if her own daughter were abused, the Pakistani wife of one of the predators replied: “It can’t happen to our children because they are not in the streets. We look after them.”

When Rahim’s uncle was finally arrested, following the revelation that he had abused other children in the neighbourhood, the Pakistani community came together to do damage control. By this point, the abuser had two young children of his own. Rahim’s parents were advised by other Pakistani immigrants not to talk about his crimes because “they didn’t want the family’s image to be tarnished in the community”. They put pressure on Rahim to write a letter to the judge asking for a lighter sentence, their logic being that his cousins shouldn’t be made to grow up without a father.

“I was young at the time,” Rahim reflects. “I just did whatever the adults told me to do, so I wrote it.” His uncle went to prison for two years. When he was released, he and his family moved to Alberta. “His wife never left him, and his kids have no idea,” Rahim says. Rahim’s father forgave his brother, and even flew across the country to meet with him. “When he was in prison, everyone asked where he was, and we just lied and said he got a job up in the Northwest Territories and he’s making a lot of money up there. It was the community convincing my parents to cover it up.”

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Tragic as it is, Rahim’s story is not unusual. It illustrates how sexual abuse goes unchecked within Pakistani communities. Rapists know that the community will not ostracise them. They’ll never be without a home or a job. Their mothers, siblings, wives and friends will actually cover for them. Even if they are convicted, they will most likely spend only a few years behind bars before they’re free to re-offend. They may even be encouraged to see themselves as victims of a racist criminal justice system that treats minorities unfairly. In Shafiq’s words: “They believe it is they who are victims of a racist witch-hunt — despite the fact that Pakistani gangs were allowed to rape their way around Rotherham for so long because, in part, politically correct officials were terrified of being accused of racism. They see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’.”

Sadly, there is little hope of justice for the victims of grooming gangs in the UK without the cooperation of the Pakistani community. And unless Pakistanis find the courage to shine a light on what is an atrocious open secret within our communities, I fear what happened in Rotherham will continue to happen, devastating the lives of countless children and women, immigrant or otherwise. It pains me to think that what has recently been discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, there is plenty more abuse taking place across the UK within insular Pakistani communities. And change can only come about if we set aside the tribal instincts that have enabled one of the worst cases of child sexual exploitation in modern history.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the victim.

Khan was shot last week at a political procession he had convened as part of his reckless agitation to topple Pakistan’s legitimate government. The failed assailant confessed he wished to assassinate Khan for leading Pakistanis astray; he succeeded only in lionising his target. Khan’s supporters are spinning his survival as evidence of their master’s superhuman qualities. But he is neither martyr nor saint: he remains one of the most pernicious political personalities in the world today.

Khan was first lofted into the prime minister’s office in 2018, in a vote manipulated by what Pakistan’s human rights commission described as the “blatant, aggressive and unabashed” interference of his sponsors in Pakistan’s mighty military, which has governed the Islamic republic directly or indirectly for most of its existence. Opponents of Khan were relentlessly harried and intimidated. Many Pakistanis experienced the election as a “soft coup”.

It is a measure of Khan’s incompetence that, despite the backing of the khakis, his party failed to secure a majority in parliament and had to enter into coalition to form government. One theory in Pakistan is that the military denied Khan a majority to keep him in check.

Khan had spent long years auditioning for the military’s favour. His very public conversion from dim-witted tabloid fodder in the West to a chillingly prudish regurgitator of anti-Western bromides in Pakistan eventually brought him the reward he craved. Some argued that Khan was wearing a mask. If so, the mask devoured his face. Khan, like the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, recoiled from the West with the rage of a convert.

In 2005, for instance, Newsweek published a short article on the alleged desecration of the Koran by US soldiers. The story went unnoticed until Khan, sensing an opportunity, read every line of it at a press conference. “This is what the US is doing,” he bemoaned, “desecrating the book on which our entire faith is based.” Khan’s outraged performance provoked days of religious rioting in which 17 people were killed and dozens more gravely injured. The story was later debunked and retracted. But Khan never showed a hint of contrition. Instead, seven years after that inaugural bloodbath, he went to the hospital where Malala Yousafzai was given emergency treatment and advanced a theological defence for the Taliban’s “holy war”.

The public purveyor of iman — faith —struggled in private, according to those around him, with the haram habits he had picked up in the West. One of his ex-wives told Vanity Fair that Khan sniffed huge quantities of cocaine every night during their 10-month marriage in 2015. The momin who never tired of delivering hectoring prelections on human dignity to the West apparently also used racist language in private. He could not have been unaware of the consequences of such bigotry: after all, a kinsman of his had overseen the slaughter of three million Bengalis — a people denigrated by Pakistani officials as “black monkeys” — in 1971.

Nonetheless, as prime minister, Khan pledged to remake Pakistan into a new Medina. He took a third wife, a fully veiled clairvoyant who claimed to have had visions of his triumphs, and subordinated his temporal duties to the task of establishing himself as the champion of the Islamic ummah.

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His reign embodied the confusions that have stalked Pakistan ever since its invention in 1947. Is it the homeland of Indian Muslims? Or is it the truncated residue of the medieval Arab-Islamic invaders of India? No other country celebrates its own despoilers as Pakistan does. The Arabs had stormed Sindh, now in Pakistan, in the 8th Century and spent weeks slaughtering the natives and plundering their riches. But those conquerors are the heroes in Pakistani lore, and the country’s great public works carry their name. Faith has complicated Pakistanis’ relationship to Pakistan: are they natives or aliens, progeny of the soil or foreign implants on it? Are they Indian or Arab? These aren’t academic questions: the massacre of Bengalis in 1971 was animated by the belief that they were, as the US consul-general in Dhaka at the time put it, “heretics” corrupted by veneration for their pre-Islamic customs.

Khan exemplified this crisis of identity. As prime minister, he behaved less like the leader of his country and more like the delegate of a pre-eminent global community posted in its South Asian outpost. His identification with faith eclipsed all other affinities. He radiated contempt for India, the land of his kith, and raised the spectre of nuclear war with it — but claimed kinship with faraway Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the name of faith.

The worsening plight of ordinary Pakistanis became the least of Khan’s concerns in office once he set himself up as the tribune of oppressed Muslims and began routinely lashing out at the West and other non-Muslim governments for their treatment of his co-religionists. But just as the preacher of austere faith could reconcile himself allegedly to the ecstasies of cocaine in private, the champion of Muslim dignity made convenient exceptions to his own rules in public.

The man who decried France for its “Islamophobia” gladly pitched for Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign even as it sought to smear his Muslim opponent as a terror sympathiser.

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Denouncing Indian democracy as a sham and all of India as the 21^st-century avatar of Nazi Germany for the depredations of the Hindu-supremacist regime of Narendra Modi, Khan shrugged off the concentration camps in Xinjiang, where China is torturing millions of Muslims by re-enacting some of the most degrading atrocities from the Nazi repertoire. Heading a system that formally grants its religious minorities the status of second-tier citizens, bans them legally from holding the state’s high offices and enshrines capital punishment for blasphemy against Islam in law, Khan pushed a resolution through parliament castigating Emanuel Macron for victimising France’s Muslim minorities. Vilifying the West for its prejudices, he became the most vocal champion and apologist of the Taliban.

Self-unawareness, the condition of leading a state forged in victimhood, matured into self-destructive delusion. Khan equated tweets and incoherent rants against Modi— another exponent of religious nationalism who wants to turn India into a Hindu facsimile of Pakistan—as diplomatic victories for Pakistan. He received succour from supposedly “liberal” voices whose revulsion for Modi’s brand of nationalism turned them, absurdly, into apologists for Khan’s variant of it.

In the end, it was Pakistan’s military that became unsettled by Khan’s ruinous fixations. Khan, who turned up in Moscow as Vladimir Putin’s esteemed guest on the day the Russian president launched the invasion of Ukraine, had become intolerable even for an outfit that has supported terrorism for decades. The ringmasters had treated him as a pliable monkey; but he, addled by power, was going rogue and threatening to burn down the lucrative circus they had built.

The opposition, invigorated by the growing rift between the erstwhile collaborators, called a vote of confidence in April. Khan’s claim that the military was colluding with his political rivals sounded far-fetched because it loathes the Sharifs, who lost to Khan in 2018, even more. But the military did abandon him and refuse to come to his rescue. Orphaned, he became the first prime minister to be thrown out of office by a vote in parliament.

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Out of power, Khan amplified a self-serving backstory: he described himself as the casualty of a sinister plot by America and its agents in Pakistan. Israel, naturally, was added as a co-conspirator. Khan then toiled hard, according to Islamabad, to sabotage a financial package from the International Monetary Fund to help Pakistan after it was devasted by biblical floods.  Once again, the hardships of his own people did not seem to worry the internationalist who was more preoccupied with the welfare of the Palestinians and Indian and European Muslims.

Khan’s gambit began yielding profits: in a country conditioned by decades of anti-Western, anti-Hindu and anti-Jewish rhetoric, a significant section of the society came to view him as a soldier of Islam and a victim of its enemies. His party won a series of by-elections.

Then, in October, the Election Commission of Pakistan convicted Khan of pocketing gifts from foreign dignitaries, disqualified him from membership of parliament, and barred him from public office for five years. An investigation published by the Financial Times in July disclosed that a Pakistani conman currently facing a possible sentence of 291 years in a US jail for financial fraud had funnelled millions of dollars to Khan’s party via a charity. But the revelations only strengthened the conviction of the faithful. And they answered Khan’s call to bring down the government of Pakistan through protests and marches.

Khan has already accused his successor, Shehbaz Sharif, of orchestrating the attack on him — and threatened grave consequences if the prime minister refuses to quit. Khan lives. And we should feel a measure of gratitude for this: he is a husband and a father. But Khan has seldom exhibited sympathy for others and is now threatening to intensify his street protests. So our gratitude must be tempered with some anxiety at what might lie ahead for the country he claims to love. As a Pakistani lawyer who has worked with Khan in the past told me on the day of the shooting: “The only person who benefits from the shooting on Mr Khan is Mr Khan.”

These fanatics were the night-time ogres of my childhood, the threat that never stopped growing, one that came closer and closer, became more and more visible. During the Nineties, on Moroccan campuses, the Islamists took power. The battle of ideas was being lost. On the news, we got used to that now-familiar word: “attack”. In Paris, Luxor, Algiers. In my family, we didn’t underestimate them. We knew that the more educated among them were ready to do anything to defend their vision of the world. My parents implored me to be prudent — me, who didn’t know how to shut my mouth and who played at being the rebel adolescent. No one asked me to stand my ground, to defy them. On the contrary: I was told that you had to fear them — bend the knee, keep a low profile, shut up. How do you answer parents who love you and warn you: “Don’t take risks, don’t provoke them, stay safe from their violence”?

I was 15, I was living in Rabat, and I learned to keep quiet and accept. You accepted that you had to hide when eating during Ramadan, to be afraid that somebody might smell food on you. You accepted that you had to roll up empty wine bottles in opaque bags and drive a few miles to throw them in the dustbin. You accepted that you had to listen in silence to the furious speech of a professor of religion who claimed that Jews and Christians could never go to Paradise, and you wept inside for all those you loved who weren’t Muslims, and so were exiled from Paradise. You accepted being insulted by a customs officer in Casablanca because in your suitcase, in the middle of the New Year holidays, there were things he’d identified as Christmas presents. You accepted being treated as a slut and a sinner on the beach where you’d played as a child, because now your body was an offence to God.

You accepted, and you lived both in fear and in shame. The shame of our cowardice, of the denials that fed and grew on it. The shame of not being able better to defend the Islam of my grandfather, who is in Paradise with his Christian wife. “A thousand little stings of self-reproach that add up not to remorse but to a vague unease.”* That’s what you felt. You felt ugly and small. For reassurance, you said to yourself that it’s we who have right on our side, that we know the frontiers of Good and Evil, of reason and barbarism, and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t dare defend them at the top of your voice. We have to save our skin. Our limp, feeble, losers’ skin — but our skin all the same.

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There was one moment when I didn’t feel afraid. One moment when I felt brave. It was enough for me to close my office door, open up my computer — it was enough for me to start to write, and the fear vanished. That was why I became a writer. To purge my nightmares, to calm my terrors. When I write, I feel capable of anything. I’m no longer a polite little girl, a virtuous woman. I’m not trying to please or to seduce. I’m not afraid of provoking anger or scandal. For me fiction is the terrain of total freedom, the place where you can give expression to ambiguity, fuzziness, uncertainty, where you can contradict yourself and voice bad thoughts.

Tomorrow, at my work table, will I feel as free as before? Tomorrow, taking the stage for a discussion, will I be thinking of Salman and will I fear being attacked myself? Today, a lot of Muslim writers are afraid, and censoring themselves. I don’t judge them; I understand them, and I too think of my family and children. But fear and shame have to switch sides. We have to speak more loudly, become more persuasive, become the voices of Enlightenment, the voices of liberty and dignity. As writers, it’s the only way to be: stifle fear as soon as it appears; have faith in the intelligence of readers; be insolent and irreverent. Write, write, write. Do not submit; do not get down on your knees.

*From Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” (Translator’s Note).
Translated by Boyd Tonkin. The original French can be read here.

The French are decreasingly guarded about exposing their dislike of the emerging demography of France — where a large and growing North African population inhabits suburban rings around the tiny cores of many historic cities from the Mediterranean to the Channel. I thought of my hostess from 40 years ago when travelling with my wife near Rheims last year. Our hotelier, a woman with an elegant home and her own family mark of champagne, told us enthusiastically about the wonderful Monsieur Zemmour, an intellectual writer and broadcaster who had not at that stage declared himself as a presidential candidate but who she thought might just save France.

Arriving in the village in the Pyrenees Orientales where we spend much of our time, we heard the same from our elderly, highly cultivated neighbour and an artisan friend of hers. Of course, neither would actually vote for Zemmour if he stood, they assured us (not entirely convincingly), but he was very impressive. And had we noticed the first veils arriving in the nearest town and occasionally in the village itself?

This is a region that Pepin and his son Charlemagne captured from the Moors in the late ninth century, a fact attested to by a series of local Romanesque chapels dating from the following two centuries. Our neighbour and her friend felt they were witnessing a reversal of the Carolingian handiwork: an area once wrested from the Muslims by the Christians was being wrested back, not through warfare but through migration and a higher birth rate.

The French have long been obsessed by demography — and with good reason. When Napoleon dominated the continent early in the nineteenth century, his population was at least half as large as Britain’s — even including Ireland — and also half as large again as what was to become Germany. In its glory — in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — France was Europe’s population behemoth.

But whereas in the century before the outbreak of the First World War, France’s population grew from around 30 to around 40 million, Britain’s rose from around 25 million to around 45 million, despite the massive emigration by which people of British origin had settled vast swathes of the globe, from California to Tasmania. Over the same period, not only was Germany unified, but its population rose from a little over 20 million to around 65 million. Industrialisation was also slower in France than in Britain or Germany, in part due to the lack of raw materials; the best iron deposits were lost to the Germans with Lorraine. But it was a lack of manpower which proved decisive, whether in the factories or at the front.

It was clear long before the bloodiest battles on the western front that France was a second-rate power dependent on British and Russian allies just to hold its own. The defeat of 1870 at the hands of the Prussians and their allies was a national trauma; the ignominy of the lost lands beyond the ligne bleu of Alsace and Lorraine were deeply etched on French consciousness. And population — or lack of it — was blamed. As early as 1849, a French parliamentary deputy saw national decline as rooted in demography: “The first element of power is population, and on this point … France is in full decay.” By the time of the outbreak of war in 1914, more than half of French parliamentarians were members of the Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Natality. French family sizes had shrunk long before those of other European powers, for reasons till not entirely clear. We know enough to understand that the cause was a comparatively low birth rate, though, rather than a high death rate: perhaps the French peasants figured out how to limit their procreation earlier than people elsewhere.

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But if defeat in the Franco-Prussian war excited a demographic alarm, the travails of 1914-1918 turned the problem into a source of despair. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau may have got a lot of what he wanted in the Treaty of Versailles in terms of punishing Germany, but he declared: “The treaty does not say that France must undertake to have children but it is the first clause which should have been included in it … One can take all of Germany’s guns, one can do whatever one likes, France will be lost because there is no more Frenchman.”

Inter-war, the French made efforts to boost their numbers. Prolific mothers were offered medals. The Alliance pour l’Accroissement de la Population française advocated larger families. It also supported immigration of Europeans, ideally Catholics, who could be absorbed into the French nation. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Belgians and Italian came to live in France between the wars; France had a foreign-born population three times as large as the UK’s in the 1930s (almost six times if the Irish are excluded from the UK figure).

And yet, in 1937 Paul Reynaud, a minister and later prime minister, still lamented: “There is a single factor which dominates everything: the demographic factor. Forty-one million Frenchmen face sixty-seven million Germans and forty-three million Italians, these last two countries linked by the Berlin-Rome axis.… As far as numbers are concerned, we are beaten.” Germany’s fertility rate had plummeted as well, but the enemy over the Rhine was still far too numerous for France to compete. Population pessimism was a critical component in the general atmosphere which led to the collapse of 1940.

After the Second World War, things looked up — demographically and in every other way. France had its own baby boom, moderate though it was, and although fertility rates have fallen in recent decades, they are still higher than in most other European countries, not least Germany. A residue of Catholicism as well as an atmosphere conducive to women combining parenthood with a career seem to have helped.

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The French population also swelled with the arrival of people from the former colonies, first the pieds noirs fleeing the conflict in Algeria, then Algerian Muslims and migrants from the once vast French Empire south of the Sahara. But here lay the rub. Earlier migrant groups had been quite easily absorbed. In the Pyrenees Orientales, for example, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled Franco’s advance in 1939, and today their descendants have completely merged with the locals who share their Catalan identity. But although France’s republican and secular ideology demurs from formally categorising citizens, those from more distant cultures have not integrated to the same extent.

That’s not to say that France completely failed in its efforts to absorb this new wave of immigrants. A survey from, admittedly 17 years ago, showed Muslims in France much more likely to identify primarily with their nation than with their religion — when compared with those in Germany, Spain and the UK — and more likely to hold favourable views of Christians and Jews.

But, since then, France has suffered particularly acutely from Islamist terrorism. The attacks on the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo offices are just the most notorious examples; similar incidents in a Jewish school and a supermarket, as well as the murder of a teacher offending Islamic sensibilities, have angered and stirred up the country. Around half of French Muslims report experiencing discrimination and two thirds believe their religion is negatively perceived by their fellow citizens.

Moreover, though the French state avoids and in some cases bans the collection of data by religion or ethnicity, there is plenty of evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that French Muslims are more prone to deprivation and unemployment than their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

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Now, the political rhetoric around French demography is as charged as it was 100 years ago. Today the worry comes not from across the Rhine but from over the Mediterranean. A demographic pessimism hangs over France much as it did back when Reynaud despaired in the face of a larger German population. More than 60% of French people believe that white Christians will be rendered extinct by Muslims. There is talk of lost suburbs where women and men are increasingly separated in public. A French journalist who worked on a story of no-go Islamic zones recently received death threats and is under police protection. Around 20 retired generals have warned that Islam is taking over parts of the country and have raised the possibility of a racially-driven civil war.

In this febrile atmosphere, it is small wonder that two of the leading candidates in the fast-approaching presidential election are explicitly anti-Islam. Zemmour has said he is standing “to save France from Islam” and has called on Muslims to abandon their religion. Marine Le Pen has proposed a headscarf ban and compared Muslims praying in the street with the Nazi occupation. Not to be outdone, the centre has followed the lead of the Right: President Macron has vowed to fight “Islamic separatism” and his interior minister has taken an activist line in controlling Muslim political associations. Although the Left is generally more sympathetic to minorities, it has a strong tradition of secularism (laïcité) which often rubs up against Muslim practice.

The consensus is that Macron and his associates will succeed in stealing the thunder of the two far-Right candidates and that he will emerge as the clear winner. Despite the enthusiasm of my interlocutors last year, Zemmour seems to be sinking while Le Pen rises. She will have to do much better in debates with Macron than she did in 2017 if she is to stand a chance of not being trounced; Macron’s superior intellect counts a lot with the French, who are unapologetic about their respect for brain power.

But bear this in mind: when Le Pen’s father faced Jacques Chirac in the second round in 2002, the far-Right candidate received just 18% of the vote; 15 years later, his daughter got almost 34%. In a France once more obsessed by its own demographic decline, the unthinkable is increasingly becoming thinkable; the unsayable becoming sayable. Nothing can be discounted.

The strange thing is that the piece was a defence of Muslim women’s right to wear the full veil, and a condemnation of the Danish government’s decision to ban them. It was a couple of nasty little throwaway lines that caused the outrage, rather than the content itself.

Now, the NGO Tell MAMA, which records anti-Muslim incidents, has said that the piece was followed by a 375% surge in abuse and attacks on Muslims. The Guardian goes further, saying that the comments “led to a surge in anti-Muslim attacks”.

That sounded absolutely extraordinary to me. A 375% increase is enormous. So I thought I’d have a closer look.

The report records all “anti-Muslim incidents” received by Tell MAMA. That includes offline and online incidents, and also both verbal abuse and physical assaults. Tell MAMA says that it received 1,282 reports of anti-Muslim incidents in 2018, and that it “verified” 1,072 of them, 745 of which were offline.

Johnson’s “letterboxes” column was published on Monday 5 August 2018. In the week before that, Tell MAMA “received 8 reports of street-based (offline) anti-Muslim attacks”, by which I think they mean all incidents. But in the week afterward, the 6th to the 13th, “this jumped to 38, an increase of 375%”.

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If I’ve read it correctly, and they’re referring to all verified offline incidents, then 745 incidents a year translates to a bit more than 14 a week, on average. So the eight reported the week before was anomalously low, making that 375% increase sound much more dramatic.

Still, 38 is 165% above the average. But, again, I can’t work out whether that’s unusual. The report doesn’t give weekly breakdowns, so I can’t see whether the numbers are usually pretty steady around the average, or if they jump up and down a lot. If the former, then a week of 38 is surprising; if the latter, it might not be. (I have asked Tell MAMA for more information, but so far, I haven’t heard anything; I’ll add an update here if I hear back from them.)

They do have a breakdown by month, which shows in August there were around 70 of these incidents, about the same as April, May and June, and rather lower than March, which had a little over 80. The Tell MAMA report says that the March spike was driven by a horrible letter-writing campaign called Punish a Muslim Day which called for anti-Muslim attacks on the 3 April.

I think, though, that the really standout thing about these numbers is how tiny they are. For instance, there were only 327 verified anti-Muslim incidents online in the whole of 2018. I can’t believe for a second that there aren’t more than that every day on Twitter alone, if “anti-Muslim incident” includes abusive language.

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There are more than three million Muslims in the UK. Tell MAMA recorded about 1,000 anti-Muslim incidents, on and offline, and said that the police recorded nearly 2,000 more (they say there’s no overlap). If those numbers are the whole story – and Tell MAMA are very clear in saying that they’re not – then at most one in 1,000 British Muslims were the victims of anti-Muslim abuse of some form last year. I would be amazed if that’s not a huge underestimate.

What that means is that it’s much less likely that the Tell MAMA numbers are recording real underlying change. It’s like an opinion poll – the smaller your sample, the less likely it is to be representative of the population. In real opinion polls, the pollsters try to get around that problem by finding a representative sample, and weighting it where it is not.

The Tell MAMA numbers come from people who contact Tell MAMA, which is a non-random, non-representative sample of the population. It could, for instance, be simply that, in the aftermath of high-profile events such as Johnson’s column, anti-racist projects such as Tell MAMA get more publicity and so get more reports. Given the difficulty of teasing out media effects on real-world behaviour, that sounds more likely to me than a single column, behind the Telegraph paywall, causing a 375% spike in incidents.

The question, of course, is what is really happening with anti-Muslim hate crimes and abuse. Unnervingly, hate crimes recorded by the police have gone up dramatically in the past few years: from a little over 40,000 in 2011/12 to nearly 100,000 in 2017/18. Racially motivated crimes have gone up from 35,000 to 70,000; religiously motivated ones from 1,600 to 8,300.

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But those increases, according to the police themselves, are largely due to the police getting better at recording these sorts of crimes, and a growing public awareness of them leading to more reporting. A Home Office hate crime report, using the Crime Survey for England and Wales data, reports that the total number of hate crimes has in fact dropped, from around 300,000 in 2007 to about 184,000 in 2018, although religiously motivated incidents have stayed roughly steady at about 38,000.

Interestingly, there was some evidence (not from the CSEW but from Home Office figures) of some spikes after major incidents – but those incidents were huge national news stories, such as the EU referendum or the five terror attacks in 2017, not pay-walled columns. And even they aren’t anything like the 375% increase Tell MAMA claims; they’re larger spikes in a spiky line.

So the problem is both less and more than the Tell MAMA report suggests, I think. Boris Johnson’s reckless column gets far more notoriety than it deserves; it may have caused a few isolated incidents, but I would be astonished if it had the sort of major effect it claims. But hate crimes in general are much more common than the small numbers Tell MAMA records.

Tell MAMA aren’t a polling company: they exist to give Muslims a place to report the abuse and attacks they find themselves on the end of. I don’t blame them for trying to collate that data and turn it into something useful. But the media should know better than to take the dramatic numbers it comes up with at face value, assume a causal link where none can be shown, and then plaster the whole thing under a dramatic headline. Britain already feels like a powder keg, and these are just more sparks flying around.

A new report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change returns us to this fraught subject. “Narratives of Hate: The Spectrum of Far-right Worldviews in the UK” takes a look at a number of groups which it identifies as “far-Right”. These are: Generation Identity England, Britain First, For Britain and the British National Party. The report states that if these groups are “left unaddressed”, then they will “continue to sow division in Britain”.

In its assessment, the report takes the beliefs of these groups and compares them with those of the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in July 2011. His views, according to the TBI, provide “a clear baseline to examine other extremist messages in the far Right”.

All these groups, according to the report, hold views which include “Believing that Islamist scriptures promote violent jihad and terrorism”; “Claiming that Muslim immigration to Western countries is paving the way for implementing Sharia and Islamic laws, and ‘Islamifying’ Europe”; and “Suggesting that Muslims are more prone to committing acts of sexual violence and rape”. Another accusation made by all these groups is that the authorities and the media have been “covering up crimes committed by Muslims and immigrants”.

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I am uncomfortable with the idea of using a terrorist or mass murderer as a ‘baseline’ measure. After all, if some madman tomorrow committed an atrocity in the name of the environment, free healthcare or any other idea, would the TBI use this as a reason to tar as a violent extremist anyone who held the same beliefs?  Political violence, by its very nature, steps beyond the ordinary run of political discussion.

But there are pools and swamps of opinion in which people do swim before they commit atrocities. And it probably is worth trying to work out what it is there that leads someone towards violence. To do so, however, is a complex process, and we are all, to some extent, learning as we go along on. The list of arguments provided by the TBI shows how difficult this is.

For instance, there are indeed people who accuse all Muslims of terrible things, as laid out in the list. By doing so, they are clearly uttering an untruth, as well as showing an ugly, bigoted tendency to smear an entire group based on the practises of a small few. What, though, if someone were to point to the fact – which numerous reports including this one from the Muslim-run Quilliam Foundation have shown – that men of Muslim background are ‘over-represented’ (that is, compared to their proportion in the general population) in gang ‘grooming’ cases. And what if someone were to say that the authorities and the media have been involved in ‘covering up’ such crimes?

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To suggest that there had been a concerted, orchestrated cover-up which involved every portion of the state and media might sound like a wild exaggeration. It might sound deeply conspiratorial. But the problem is that it is not wholly untrue. It is only an exaggeration – in fact, we only know of the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oxfordshire and other places because some brave individuals from the political and media establishments broke ranks and reported these horrific stories.

Andrew Norfolk of The Times, for example, spent years chasing the Rotherham story, including speaking to many of the victims. He reported on this and subsequent cases in spite of people still (even then) attempting to charge him with ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ for reporting the story.

It’s problematic for the Blair assessment, too, that we know that there were cover-ups, and that these were duly exposed. In 2013, Alexis Jay was tasked by Rotherham’s council with looking into the crimes that had occurred there. Her report found that there had indeed been a systematic failure to address the cases when they had come out. And that the rape of children as young as 11 had been ignored by the local police and by the local council, among other authorities.

The Jay report – like Louise Casey’s which followed – found that a culture in which people feared accusations of racism was one of the reasons that these dreadful cases had been able to go on as long as they had. Likewise, there are reliable and verified reports going back a decade and half showing that the media and authorities have often cooperated to ‘pull’ reporting of such horrific stories, to allay other concerns.

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So here lies the problem with the Blair Institute’s claims. They seek to draw a line designating as ‘extreme’ some views which are also true. Given that the cover-ups have been proved – and officially registered – why should saying as much be cause to label someone as ‘far-right’ or linked to a mass murderer?

The answer appears to lie in the move from ‘some’ to ‘all’ and from ‘cases’ to ‘endemic’. It is true that some groups – including those which the TBI identifies – may be guilty of wild exaggeration. But all politics – and you may say all political debate – relies on a degree of exaggeration to make a point. The Institute might consult with its founder if it seeks any pertinent examples. And though most of us tire or are turned off by such exaggerations (generally realising in the process that the person in question cannot be trusted), it is some leap to say that an exaggeration should demand the intervention of the law.

Yet the TBI seems to think it should. It argues that depending on where various opinions sit on its scale of extremism, the groups it looks into ought to be ‘designated’ as ‘hate groups’. It calls for political leaders to, among other things, “Stop problematic groups and stem their narratives”. Suggestions for how to do this would include ensuring that ‘designated hate groups’ would be ‘impeded from appearing on media outlets or engaging with public institutions’. But all would not necessarily be lost for the groups in question. “Hate designation would be time-limited and automatically reviewed, conditioned on visible reform of the group.”

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Beneath the bland and unassuming presentation, this, and much else in the report, is in some ways extraordinary.  What is one to say of a situation in which government officials could designate and ban from all media – including state-run and privately-owned media – groups whose views and expressions they disapprove of, pending official investigation and evidence of that group’s realignment with views which are more acceptable? Such a plan would be authoritarian even if the groups in question were guilty of spreading constant and provable lies.

Yet the problem the TBI inadvertently highlights is that while everything these groups say may be unpleasant and ugly, not everything they say is false. Some of the things the Institute would have them banned for saying are true, or true in part.

Here is the test for a society, and indeed a test for independently-financed organisation like the one which produced this report. Where somebody is wrong, they should be shown to be wrong. Where they are wrong in part, they should be shown to be wrong in part. But, as with Islamist groups, asking the state to decide on such matters demands that the state be infallible in making such decisions. Drawing lines in these areas is hard. A fact that the Tony Blair Institute has perhaps unwittingly demonstrated.

“We stand here tonight … among the rubble of what was once the grandest and most beautiful civilization the world has ever known.”

On 20 March, an exhilarated Thierry Baudet, the 36-year-old leader of the Dutch Forum for Democracy (FvD), addressed an ecstatic crowd with a message of decline and a promise of resurrection.

“We are being destroyed by those who should be protecting us. We are being undermined by our universities, our journalists. By the people whose art is subsidized by the state and those who design our buildings. And especially by those who govern us […], people who haven’t read a book in their lives, have no idea what the long-term issues are, [and who] time and time again, in a strange mix of incompetence and cynical self-interest, make the wrong choices. But not for long!”

The populist rhetoric is now familiar in the Netherlands. It was the size of Baudet’s win that was the surprise. The FvD party, with its anti-immigrant, anti-EU and anti-liberal far-Right agenda, won some 17% of the votes in the provincial elections, more than any other party – something that is all the more remarkable given it has only been in existence for two years.

It is interesting too, in what it says about how the populist message is shifting.

Over the past 17 years, the political landscape in the Netherlands has become volatile and fragmented. The seeds of change were planted in the late 1990s by politicians such as Frits Bolkestein, of the Right-liberal VVD, who was among the first to question the country’s long-standing multicultural approach to immigration.

Then Pim Fortuyn, in the early 2000s, managed to associate a blanket rejection of non-Western immigrants, particularly Muslims, with the defense of progressive values like tolerance, gender equality, free speech, and gay rights — values, moreover, that he redefined in nationalist terms as quintessentially Dutch. Fortuyn was the founding father of a homegrown, Dutch brand of xenophobic populism that now represents more than a fifth of political opinion.

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He was murdered, in 2002, shot by a Dutch environmental activist who declared him to be a “threat to Dutch society’. Then, two years later, in November 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh — professional provocateur and a ruthless critic of Islam, too — was killed in broad daylight in Amsterdam by a 26-year-old Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent. The murders solidified the notion — among the public and a segment of the intelligentsia — that the country’s immigration policies had failed and that the presence of “unintegrated” foreigners was a problem that called for a drastic solution.

Enter Geert Wilders’s far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) with its folksy, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim style of populism. At the last Dutch parliamentary elections, in 2017, Wilders’s party achieved an unprecedented 13 percent of the vote, good for 20 seats and becoming the second-largest party after Rutte’s liberal VVD. At those same elections, Baudet’s party, barely six months old, won a surprising two seats.

Two years on, the FvD’s growth has come partly at the expense of Wilders’s PVV. But transfer votes from Wilders alone don’t account for Baudet’s meteoric rise. So where is the new support coming from?

Wilders and Baudet do share some central positions. Both, for example, have called for a radical stop to immigration from non-Western cultures. Both believe that Islam is incompatible with Dutch values and traditions. Both decry the domination of Dutch institutions by Leftist elites. And both seek to tap into a widespread anxiety among some sectors of the Dutch population that their culture is under serious threat.

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But in his personal style and cultural background, Baudet is Wilders’s polar opposite.

Wilders was born in 1963 in the southern province of Limburg and raised a Roman Catholic; his mother is of Indonesian descent. A career politician in Rutte’s VVD, he broke with that party in 2006 to found the PVV, convinced that the VVD did not sufficiently acknowledge the threat of Islam and immigration.

Baudet’s biography could not be more different. Born into a non-religious middle-class family in Haarlem, half an hour from Amsterdam, he attended his hometown’s prestigious Gymnasium and went on to read history and law in Leiden. In 2012, he earned his PhD in Law with a thesis co-directed by Roger Scruton.

Baudet has cultivated a public image as a witty and charming provocateur. He proudly claims to hate modern art, contemporary classical music, and contemporary architecture. In his free time, he plays classical piano. He sleeps little and reads widely. He’s written several books, including a novel.

He is not your standard Right-wing populist. He calls himself a “romantic conservative”. In fact, his worldview is deeply elitist, with elements reminiscent of José Ortega y Gasset’s reactionary 1929 classic The Revolt of the Masses.

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The problem, in Baudet’s eyes, is not that there is an elite. The problem is that the current elite is ignorant, incompetent, immoral, and weak. It needs to be replaced. Baudet’s view of the world is decidedly Darwinian: we should trust our instincts. Life is a struggle. Strength is what counts. Those who are not ready to fight are bound to be conquered. It’s the West against the rest.

Baudet likes to use Scruton’s term oikophobia, the repudiation of one’s own cultural inheritance, to diagnose the pathology of the Netherlands’ political and cultural leadership. Suffering from “a spiritual disease,” he claims, the country’s elites have been wilfully weakening Dutch political sovereignty by selling out to a faceless, bureaucratic European Union.

At the same time, they have allowed Dutch national culture to be “homeopathically diluted” through the ever-increasing influx of non-integrated non-Western refugees and immigrants. They have undermined the country’s defense mechanisms by suffocating it under a blanket of leftist illusions, numbing bureaucracy, and political correctness.

To the Left, the statements sound worryingly close to fascism. What concerns the liberal-Right is the ease with which Baudet dismisses the foundations of liberal democracy — including parliamentary politics.

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But for much of the population, his words are a breath of fresh air in a political climate where neoliberal technocracy, closed-door coalition negotiations, a culture of compromise, and politicians’ embarrassing slip-ups have undermined people’s faith in their leaders. It’s a message that resonates with Wilders’s voter base: the disgruntled white urban working class and conservative rural voters. To them, Baudet appears to offer to a chance to take back control.

His sophisticated, provocative image as a dangerous dandy who is not afraid to say what he thinks is also broadening his appeal to more educated voters. In particular, the FvD is gathering an enthusiastic following among university students, especially men, who are tickled by the idea that they would make far better national leaders than the current political class.

Today’s leaders, according to Baudet:

“no longer believe in the Netherlands. […] Not in our language […] not in our arts, in our past. They no longer believe in our holidays, our heroes.”

Today’s heroes are Baudet and his army. If things had not gone so badly, he said:

“I would have never entered politics. But we have been called to the front because it’s necessary. Because our country needs us. […] Today, we have chosen to go to battle again. To dream, to hope, to fight again.”

Such fighting talk is a far cry from Wilders’s one-man-show, which seems to have run out of steam after 13 years of not achieving very much policy-wise.

Baudet, by contrast, has a very specific platform of ideas. These include replacing the current system of political appointments to public or semi-public management positions with an open application process, moving to direct mayoral elections, and bringing in binding referendums on important political issues. Some of these measures, including directly elected mayors, have been long demands of the liberal Left. The call for referendums, meanwhile, cleverly taps into widespread discontent with the way the Dutch government adopted a referendum law in 2015, only to abandon it after it saw itself forced to ignore the results of the consultations.

He is outspoken, too, on environmental policy. Baudet is opposed to any efforts to counteract climate change, which he sees as a “masochistic heresy fed by guilt”, “a secularised belief in the Deluge” that will “not only mean the total collapse of our economy but is also meant to further hurt our spirit and self-confidence”.

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How Populist is the Wizard of Oz?

By Peter Franklin

This element of his platform, too, represents an electoral option that no other party has dared to offer. Although the Dutch economy has had a better recovery from the Great Recession than most other EU countries, the government’s climate policy has resulted in a significant increase of household energy bills.

So what happens next? If parliamentary elections were held today, polls suggest, the PVV and FvD would together win 22% of the vote, which in the Netherlands’ almost fully representational system would correspond to about 34 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber —an absolute record, and a far cry from the one or two seats that radical Right parties would win until 20 years ago.

Will the other Dutch parties be willing to govern with Baudet and his crew, given that his party is most likely to become the largest in the Senate chamber? Prime Minster Rutte has trouble enough as it is keeping his four-party, centre-Right coalition together.

Some propose a principled cordon sanitaire, refusing any gesture that could be seen as legitimating radical-Right positions. Others remember how attempts to form a parliamentary coalition with Wilders’ party several years ago were sabotaged by Wilders himself, when he refused to adhere to the Dutch political culture of compromise.

Baudet, however, has said he understands that entering a coalition will require concessions. Perhaps in anticipation of this next phase, he appears to have modified his position on the Netherlands’ relationship with the EU. For many years, he openly advocated for the country to leave. (“After #Brexit we should have #Nexit,” he tweeted in May 2016.)  Yet when, on 2 April, Wilders’ party proposed a parliamentary motion for Nexit, the FvD’s two deputies voted it down. The FvD continues to be sceptical about Europe but says that the voters, not the parliament, should make decision to stay or leave, through a referendum.

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The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

Baudet is clearly determined to keep his momentum. “We are building a party with its own educational institute,” he said on 20 March. “We will educate a new generation to replace and defeat our current leaders. … So that we may finally rule our own country once again.”

But the volatility of Dutch electoral politics today makes for rapid rises and equally precipitous falls. Quick expansion carries risks — and so does assuming actual government responsibilities, whether it’s at the local, provincial, or national level.

Fortuyn’s party collapsed as quickly as it was born. Wilders’ PVV, unable to deliver, has passed its peak. Baudet, though, seems to have learned from the organisational failures of his populist predecessors. Still, the day-to-day of governing — if his party gets that far — will prove a crucial test.

But given the ascent of nationalist Right-wing movements elsewhere in the world and the Left’s relative impotence in the face of their rise, Baudet, even more than Fortuyn and Wilders, looks set to enjoy the advantage of a strong global tailwind.

In his confession Qadri, a member of Taseer’s security team, justified his actions saying they were required to defend Islam. He was found guilty of ‘terrorism’ and handed the death penalty.  At his appeal hearing before the Islamabad High Court in 2015, Qadri was again feted by hundreds of lawyers who declared they were acting to meet their ‘Islamic obligations’.  His defence team which included two retired Justices – one of them the former Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court – also claimed to be doing their ‘religious duty’.

Qadri was finally executed in 2016 after Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld his death sentence. He has since been canonised by his followers and his grave in Lahore transformed into a shrine. The 700-strong lawyers’ forum which rose to his defence has vowed to continue his struggle against blasphemy.

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By James M Dorsey

The spectacle of a legal community entrusted with upholding the rule of law, yet prepared to defend acts of unbridled vigilantism in the name of Islam, left many observers of Pakistan mystified about a country that projects itself as ‘modern’ and ‘moderate’. No less confusing was the sight of Qadri defending the use of violence while also professing his ties to peaceful branches of local Sufi Islam.

A reminder of these contradictions came to the fore in the wake of the recent controversy over the decision of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to acquit Asia Bibi of all charges of blasphemy. The judgement, issued in late 2018 and reiterated in January this year, unleashed a storm of protest which threatened to overwhelm the newly elected government of Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Though hailed by many as a landmark ruling, the Court’s verdict outraged religious parties which vowed to bring down the government unless it supported a review of the acquittal and prevented Asia Bibi from leaving the country. Faced with threats against judges and other state officials, the government capitulated.

Leading the charge against the Court’s verdict was the far-right Islamist party, the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP).  A champion of local Sufi-influenced Barelvi Islam, which is followed by a majority of Muslims in Pakistan, the TLP has long campaigned for tighter blasphemy laws as a measure of exceptional Barelvi veneration of the Prophet Muhammad.

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Under-reported: Pakistan

By Douglas Murray

In 2017, it flexed its political muscle during violent nationwide demonstrations that culminated in the resignation of the then law minister. He was accused of blasphemy for re-wording an oath administered to election candidates in ways that the TLP judged had compromised belief in the finality of the Prophet Muhammad. Its stance was strongly endorsed by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), which vowed to resist any change to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

The TLP’s political clout was confirmed in 2018, after its share of votes in the general elections held that year secured its place as the fifth largest political party in the country. No wonder, then, that it was soon wooed by the ruling PTI which, unable to forge a working consensus with the main opposition parties, resumed co-operation with the extremists to win support for its candidate as president of Pakistan.

The gambit paid off, but at the price of acceding to the TLP’s demand just weeks later to suspend the Supreme Court’s judgement in favour of Asia Bibi.

The PTI’s championing of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws has been mirrored by other ‘mainstream’ political parties. In 2017, the then ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), whose law minister had been forced to resign over charges of blasphemy, took credit for inaugurating a major hospital wing in Lahore named after Ghazi Ilm-uddin. He had been sentenced to death in 1929 for killing a Hindu publisher whom he accused of publishing a blasphemous text.

Canonised by his followers (the prefix ‘Ghazi’ stands for a Muslim fighter against non-Muslims), Ilm-uddin’s defence was handled by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, later the founder of Pakistan. Pakistan’s national poet, Muhammad Iqbal, paid tribute to Ilm-uddin at his funeral praising him as “one who has surpassed us all”. Jinnah and Iqbal, who are both hailed as beacons of modernity and moderation in Pakistan, have been embraced as models by those fighting today to protect the state against blasphemy.

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Why we must not tolerate intolerance

By Benedict Rogers

The foundations of a modern Pakistan in thrall to medieval laws of blasphemy were laid in the mid-1970s when a constitutional amendment overseen by a progressive government under the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) stripped the country’s Ahmadi minority of its status as Muslim. The grounds for doing so rested on claims that Ahmadis questioned the finality of the Prophet Muhammad.

The amendment, which remains in force, opened the way for a series of draconian changes to Pakistan’s Penal Code in the 1980s. Introduced as part of an Islamisation programme imposed to shore up the legitimacy of a military regime that had seized power in 1977, the changes set new and extreme standards of punishment – notably the death penalty – reserved specially for acts of blasphemy against Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.

In a break with British colonial laws on blasphemy dating from the 1860s, which had until then formed the basis of Pakistan’s laws, the new measures aimed squarely to enhance protection for the religious beliefs of the Muslim majority rather than to safeguard the religious freedom of minorities.

But the new laws were also noteworthy on other counts: there were no agreed standards of evidence; no requirement to prove intent; no penalties for false allegations, and no clear guide-lines for what actually constituted blasphemy. Most remarkably, accusers retained the right not to repeat offending statements in court in case it aggravated the blasphemy, leaving the accused vulnerable to a sentence without knowing what was said or done to have constituted blasphemy.

These features continue to define Pakistan’s blasphemy laws though it is worth noting that no one convicted of blasphemy has yet been executed.

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Nevertheless, the laws have been flagrantly abused. The flimsy burden of proof attached to accusations of blasphemy has led to an escalation in vigilante justice in which at least 70 people accused of blasphemy have been killed by mobs since 1990. Most of the victims were non-Muslims.

Lax standards of evidence have also encouraged the laws to be used to settle personal scores and disputes over money in which Muslims as well as non-Muslims have faced prosecution on false charges of blasphemy. Indeed, more Muslims than non-Muslims have been prosecuted for blasphemy.

The flaws in the laws make them ripe for reform. Yet calls for change have been fraught with risk and the price exacted quite simply intolerable. In the same year – 2011 – that Taseer was shot dead, another Christian government minister who had sided with him was also killed. A senior parliamentarian, Sherry Rehman, who had sought to table a bill proposing amendments was forced to abandon her campaign after receiving death threats.

But arguably the greatest obstacle to reform lies in profound national uncertainty over Pakistan’s Islamic identity. Much of it stems from rival conceptions of Pakistan, which juxtapose the country’s responsibilities as a modern Muslim homeland ready to take its place in the global community of nations, against its obligations to fulfil some Divine purpose as a guarantor of Islam. The blasphemy laws with their accent on religious boundaries and ever more rigid definitions of ‘the Muslim’, must be seen as symptomatic of these anxieties about the raison d’etre of the Pakistani state – even as they serve for some as powerful weapons to tame those anxieties.

Mark Lewis (54) is not a household name. Although as one of Britain’s leading experts in media and libel law, plenty of the events of his life and career have intersected with moments of public interest. Lewis was the lawyer representing some of the most prominent victims in the News International phone-hacking scandal. His clients included the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and also the singer Charlotte Church. More recently, he represented the food-writer Jack Munroe in her successful libel case against Katie Hopkins.

Though he was near to limelight, he never sought it for himself. A modest, self-effacing and cerebral figure, his career was not about seeking personal notoriety, but of practising the law, representing his clients and upholding what he saw to be the principles of a free and fair society.

Lewis’s decision to leave the UK, then, is the sort of act that demands some attention.

As well as being a leading lawyer, Lewis is also Jewish. As is his partner, Mandy Blumenthal. In recent years, Lewis has watched events in Britain and across Europe with increasing concern. He has watched the attacks on Jews across the continent, and has seen anti-Semitism become acceptable again in Britain – this time on the political Left. And he has seen the equanimity with which British society, and the British state, has come to view anti-Jewish extremism.

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Why we mustn't leave debate to the extremists

By Douglas Murray

For example, every year in London a march occurs called ‘The Al-Quds day march.’ It goes through the centre of London, passing the great institutions of the state, including the BBC. The day it commemorates was instituted by the late Ayatollah Khomeini and it is a day which Khomeini hoped would unite Muslims around the world. The specific purpose of the march is to call for the destruction of the state of Israel (“Al-Quds” being the Arabic for Jerusalem).

Each year, the march includes the most overt support for terrorism – including flying the flags of the terrorist group Hezbollah. The speeches follow suit. In 2017, one speaker at the Al-Quds day event (himself from a Khomeinist organisation misleadingly named the Islamic Human Rights Commission) did not merely call for the destruction of the Jewish state, but blamed “Zionists” for – among other things – the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

No charges were brought against him for this speech. It seems likely that if somebody stood up in public and made such unfounded and inciteful comments against any minority group other than Jews (even while hiding behind some thin, veneer smokescreen such as “Zionists”) that the authorities would have taken action.

In the same way that if a march took place on an annual basis which called for the eradication of a state which was the only safe-harbour for any race of people other than Jews, it is highly unlikely it would be allowed to go ahead. And if it did go ahead, then decent members of society from every walk of life and background would unite in opposition to it. But they do not. The public do not turn out to protest the Al-Quds day march as they would a march by the KKK or some neo-Nazi group.

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Earlier this year, Lewis – who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and sometimes needs to use a wheelchair – made his own stand. As the ‘Al-Quds Day’ march set off in June, Lewis – in his wheelchair – placed himself right in front of the march. Amid furious and intimidating scenes he held his ground. He refused to budge, halting the march for almost an hour. At which point a police officer threatened to arrest him and forcibly moved him to the side of the road. It was a heroic moment, where one man showed a dignified protest in the face of ceaseless and apparently unstoppable hate.

But now he has had enough. Mark Lewis and his partner Mandy arrived in Israel last week to start a new life. “Europe in my view is finished”, he told Israel’s Channel 10 on arrival into the country. “You see people murdered in museums in Belgium, people murdered in schools in France, people attacked in England. There is only one place for Jewish people to go.”

He also said that in recent years he had been subjected to an increasing number of death threats and other abuse. The couple is in no doubt as to where at least some of the blame must lie: “Jeremy Corbyn moved the rock, and the anti-Semites crawled out from underneath the rock. They’re not going back.”

Like many other Jews, it is the discovery that anti-Semitism has crept up on them from the political Left that is one of the propelling factors for such a move. It is one of the cruellest ironies of our day that the place of last resort for Jews worldwide should have become the primary focus of hatred by people who – among other things – like to think of themselves as ‘progressive’ and on the side of minority groups.

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However, the most heart-breaking comment – which should be widely heard across Britain and Europe – is what Lewis said as he arrived in Israel. “We’re a wandering people, and it’s time to wander again,” he said. “People just don’t want to see it.” He also knows other people considering the same path.

Perhaps they will see it in due course. One of the most haunting phrases in fiction in recent years is the moment in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission in which the French law professor learns that his student, and lover (who is Jewish) is planning to leave France and go to Israel to live. As she mentions it, Houellebecq’s character reflects that “I don’t have an Israel”.

To that haunting phrase of Houellebecq’s invention can now be added Lewis’s terrible one. There are many things that people can say are emblematic of an era. But that statement, “It’s time to wander again”, is as sobering and disturbing a phrase as I have heard. With implications that go deep as well as wide.

Whether words mean anything in the current era (where they often seem to mean whatever anyone wants them to) is one matter. Whether actions count for much in an era deluged by unprecedented noise and images, is another. But it seems to me that the words and actions last week of this one Jewish man and his partner should count for something. And should be thought upon by anybody who still cares to think.

But the millions raised by the Disasters Emergency Committee – £26 million for the Rohingya Crisis, £65 million for East Africa food shortage, £30 million for Yemen – or the £38 million raised by this year’s Sport Relief pale into insignificance compared to one of Britain’s most generous seasons. Ramadan.

British Muslims give literally millions to good causes during their time of fasting and feasting. The Muslim Charities Forum estimate that, in 2016, funds raised during the month of Ramadan came to around £100 million.

This philanthropic behaviour is called zakat or the ‘poor due’ – a tax on wealth which is one of the five pillars of Islam. It is a devout response to the instruction in the Qu’ran which outlines eight categories for giving:

“Zakat expenditures are only for the poor and for the needy and for those employed to collect it and for bringing hearts together and for freeing captives and for those in debt and for the cause of Allah and for the traveller – an obligation by Allah. And Allah is Knowing and Wise.”

It’s a longstanding tradition, but a new conversation is now emerging about where the money should go. And this says a lot about how Britain’s Muslims perceive themselves.

In areas of London with a large Muslim population, you will see bus stop ads like the one below, produced by the National Zakat Foundation, encouraging Muslims to give their zakat to local causes.

This is a big departure from tradition – the National Zakat Foundation says that 98% of British zakat is directed outside the UK. For Muslims who arrived here 50 or 60 years ago, it made sense to send money ‘home’ to people and places which were meaningful to them. The communities which were in their memories and their prayers were also in their cheque books.[1. Accustomed to paying zakat directly to the state – in Pakistan and parts of the Middle East it is collected automatically through bank accounts – first generation British Muslims continued to make sure their zakat went back to their countries of origin.]

“Many Muslims in the UK came here from poor backgrounds, like Kashmir or Bangladesh, so they will want to support relatives,” says Atallah Fitzgibbon, who leads global advocacy at Islamic Relief. “But some scholars say zakat needs to be given to a local community first, especially the money given during Ramadan.”

British millennial Muslims[2. The Muslim population of Britain is relatively young, with half of British Muslims under the age of 25. The median age of British Muslims is 25, compared to 39 for the wider British population.] are politically active, get involved in their local community, volunteer and have diverse groups of friends. Young Muslims went to Cumbria to assist people stranded by flooding, and raised the alarm on their way home from Ramadan evening feasting when they saw that Grenfell Tower was on fire. These younger Muslims are questioning the practice of sending their money abroad.

“A lot of this is to do with a sense of belonging,” says Iqbal Nasim, CEO of the National Zakat Foundation. “If you want a positive future as a community, you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. This is where we belong. I’m going to be living here for the rest of my life, my children are going to be living here.”

But belonging in Britain isn’t always easy for Muslims, many of whom face animosity.

“Muslims are on the whole viewed with more hostility than all other groups, by all other groups,” Dr Serena Hussain notes in the Islamophobia report produced by London-based think tank the Runnymede Trust. “This no doubt has serious implications for an entire generation of British Muslims, who despite higher rates of participation in post-16 education, continue to face multiple barriers to employment and social mobility.”

In my own work at ComRes, focused on helping employers develop workplace cultures where people of all faiths and none can thrive, Muslims report all sorts of discrimination. Muslim women say they found they were more likely to be offered a job if they remove their headscarf before the interview; they also were used to being asked, “Are you sure you can travel for work?”, as though they are under the control of a husband or father.

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Bringing people together, through their charitable giving, is a way to address this and other concerns, says Nasim. He puts it starkly: “Here in the UK, as a community we are in need.”

British Muslims belong here. This is home. They give an immense amount, and are also in need: of acceptance, opportunity, and safety. Young Muslims, brought up here, see both that their own community is under fire and also that they are surrounded by need in wider society.

Rather than retreating under the pressure of community tensions, these millennials are determined to show that they belong here by helping people close to where they live: homeless people, those using food banks, disaffected youth. Which is fitting, says Fitzgibbon, because “the prophet said ‘those who go to bed full while their neighbour is hungry are not believers’”.

Without saying a word, she demonstrated the normality of her driving a car to the leader of a country where women were banned from driving. She just got on and did it.

Vox described it as a ‘hazing’  and HuffPost called her a ‘badass’. We Brits don’t tend to think of the Queen in quite those terms, but we’re bursting with pride at her quiet demonstration of the contrast between the way we do things and the way that Saudi’s rulers do.

Saudi Arabia’s driving ban had been attributed to the teachings of the ultra-conservative Wahhabi form of Islam but a couple of weeks ago the ban was lifted.

Women are now allowed to drive, although they remain highly restricted, both in travel and other freedoms.

The jury’s out as to whether this change is more religious, political or cultural, and of course the three factors often affect each other. The Dalai Lama once told the New York Times: “I’ve gained an awareness of the sensitivity of women’s issues; even in the 1960s and 1970s, I didn’t have much knowledge of this problem.”  Religious leaders are products of their time.

It might all feel like tiny progress to those who would like to see much more parity of opportunity for women and men around the world – not least because Saudi women drivers will still be heavily restricted and require permission from a male guardian. But this step sends a signal: to Western audiences and also to Pakistan and other areas where Saudi-influenced Wahhabism has a presence. Communities in Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh look to Saudi Arabia for their moral guidance as well as their funding, and this decision will be noted there.

Women and religion

Data often suggests that women are more religious than men and more likely to pray often, although the indicators used to identify religiosity necessarily vary between religions, based on their traditions. Christian women are more likely to attend church than men are, but Muslim women are more likely to pray at home than publicly because attendance at mosque is more usually required of men than women.

Feminism and religion

There’s far more to say on women’s opportunities, freedoms and religious roles than there is room for here, but Kristin Aune’s helpful summary of the relationship between secular feminism and religion notes a three-stage journey from feminism versus religion with adversarial debates about power structures and the role of the state, through feminists turn to spirituality where female-centred spiritualities gained support, to religious feminists and the increasing voice of gender debates in some formal religions. Linda Woodhead notes that the changing role of women in the workforce occurs simultaneously with female disaffiliation from some formal religions.

Further reading

Manual al-Sharif was arrested and jailed for driving in Saudi Arabia.

Karen Armstrong explores Wahhabism, fundamentalism and the terrorism of so-called IS.

The news about the current crisis of violence and displacement seemed to come out of nowhere, when it burst onto our TV screens in August. But if you follow international – and particularly humanitarian – news, you had been hearing about it for weeks before, when the Myamnar regime threatened to refuse entry to UN investigators probing Rohingya abuses.  Last year, we saw similar violence and as many as 8,000 Rohingya were believed to be stranded at sea during 2015.

The religious and ethnic tensions go back a long way, and Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s often called by humanitarian organisations) has long been a difficult place for Muslims to live. The Rohingya people are famously homeless, being acknowledged neither by Burma or Bangladesh, and the Buddhist nation refuses to acknowledge their ethnicity in official tallies.  Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had headed the Rakhine Advisory Commission, which published a 63-page report noting that the Rohingya make up the world’s largest single stateless community.

We’re now seeing widespread criticism of Aung San Suu Kiu’s leadership, despite her having previously been lauded as a human rights champion, and even the former peace campaigner has been said to be disparaging about Muslims, allegedly grumbling last year that the BBC chose to send Mishal Husain to interview her about ethnic and religious tensions: ‘No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim’.

This explainer from the New Yorker’s Hannah Beech outlines the rocky road of Aung San Suu Kyi’s rise to, and fall from, public acclaim.

To spot emerging humanitarian stories, sign up to news bulletins like DAWNS Digest, subscribe to Reuters World emails, and take note of news coming from NGOs like Human Rights Watch or UN agencies like UNHCR.

And follow writers like UnHerd’s Ben Rogers for religious freedom news from Asia, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller for some of the best coverage of security issues (I recommend his 2015 analysis of Boko Haram , exploring the notion of a global grand caliphate), Ruth Maclean for Africa updates, especially relating to religion, AFP’s Jerome Taylor for pics and stories from South East Asia, and the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville for excellent Middle East commentary.

Trump and the (white) evangelicals

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Christians around the world, and in the US itself, about the strong links between Trump and some conservative evangelical leaders. In voting for him, they prioritised the pro-life issue over respect for women and arguably inspired Trump to issue executive orders on immigration which were perceived by many to be anti-Muslim. The link has become so entrenched that when Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy wing, criticised Trump for having ‘a track record that is unbelievably out of step with what gospel Christians believe’ his comments brought threatened withdrawal of SBC funding from 100 member churches.

Counterintuitive though this support may seem to those us outside the US, there’s a story spanning four or more decades behind it. Still within living memory are the times that US evangelicals interpreted Bible verses relating to being  ‘set apart’ to mean living in a much more separatist way than they do now, and engaging with politics was seen as ‘worldly’. It wasn’t until 1979 that Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, to mobilise evangelicals to campaign against the social and lifestyle changes which threatened their way of life, and it’s his son Jerry Falwell Jr who is often seen at Trump’s side. Within those two generations of the Falwell family, evangelical churches have moved from the shadows to being described as ‘the new super PACs’.

And there’s an emerging theology which validates this President, moving away from endorsing him on specific issues (with the exception of the travel ban and the Charlottesville violence,  which produced slight wobbles but also even louder support from Jerry Falwell Jr) towards an overall lauding of Trump as divinely appointed. The notion that he could be ‘used by God’ despite his well-known moral failings draws on Biblical parallels from the book of Daniel, where the enemy King Nebuchadnezzar inadvertently brings about God’s purposes and is described by God as ‘my servant’(Jeremiah 25:9, if you want to look it up). The new Christian Nationalism school of thought goes on to declare that God will protect the USA because Trump is President.

Read more about this narrative in a Twitter thread by Jack Jenkins.