Yahya Birt

Yahya Birt
It is obvious enough that the debate about the place of Islam in Europe has probably never been so important or sharply contested. The numbers of those who think there can be no genuine or settled place for Europe’s second largest religion seem to be growing; and this sentiment now mobilises politics in many [...]

It may be tempting fate to say so, but the conviction of the ringleaders of the airliner plot last week represents the end of an era. MI5 believes that al-Qaida has no “semi-autonomous structured hierarchy” in the United Kingdom, and there have been fewer “late-stage attack plans over the last 18 months”.
Back in the 90s [...]

Muslim communities around the country have shunned al-Muhajiroun and its various entities for years and refused to give them a platform. Instead, they have to work through front organisations, hire private halls, set up high-street stalls or leaflet people with their poisonous little tracts. They are utterly marginal but are still able to generate huge [...]

It is now a commonplace to observe that “Britishness” and “Muslimness” have become polarised: by seeking definitions against “the Muslim threat”, “true” Britishness, it is felt, can be retrieved.
Yet the evidence shows the opposite: most of Britain’s ethnic groups emphasize both religious and national identities together, a trend most noticeable among Muslim Britons. Polling usually [...]

How big a threat is “Islamic” terrorism (note the scare quotes) to Europe? It’s a valid question, and not one that we should assume we already know the answer to.
Since 9/11, politicians have had a ready answer and portray terrorism as the primary, existential threat, even in an age of global warming. For Tony Blair [...]

For the first time since 1997, the Conservatives suddenly look to be on the electoral march. A resounding victory in the local elections condemned Labour to third place and its lowest share of the vote since 1918: the Conservatives gained ground in Labour heartlands in Wales and the North, capped by Boris Johnson’s win as [...]

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent intervention on the recognition of Shariah in English law has sent the country into a spin. His address on “Civil and Religious Law in England”, which calls for “interactive pluralism” in law, is far from being a call for legal and cultural separatism. [1] However alarmed the reaction has been, [...]

The choice of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles in 1894 by the Ottoman caliph and by the Emir of Afghanistan, as a symbolic flag-bearer for British Islam is less straightforward than it might appear. One recent appropriation of his legacy presents him as a kind of proto-Brownite [...]

The biggest political problem British Muslims have faced since 9/11 has been the division of their glorious multiplicity into the simplistic binary code of “moderates” and “extremists”. This has led to a conflation of the agendas around integration and terrorism. The millions now flowing into what will basically be ‘mainstreaming” Muslim communities only becomes politically [...]

The October report, “The Hijacking of British Islam“, of Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank, alleged that a survey of one hundred mosques found that a quarter of them possessed or sold extremist literature on their premises. It was deftly timed to coincide with the state visit of King Abdullah to Britain so that David [...]