Muslim No-Go Areas In Britain?

A leading historian discusses whether moderate Muslims are creating "No-Go Zones" in Britain, from the London Times:


Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar (Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest). Ash-hadu alla ilaha illa-llah (I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship but Allah).

The call to prayer resounds across the rooftops before dawn, bringing echoes of the Levant to provincial Luton and its 30,000 Muslims. But for infidel locals, the holy wake-up is a curse. “I’d like to pull the plug on that caterwauling,” a second-generation Luton Irish woman tells me. “I go to work, and I’ve got two small kids. It’s just not fair on non-Muslim families around here.”

While nearly three out of four people in Britain claim some form of Christian affiliation, Christianity makes ever less demands on the public space. Even nativity plays are surrendering to the sensitivities of secularists and other faiths. But the impact of Britain’s estimated 1.6m Muslims is increasingly assertive. Asian Muslims account for about 1 in 50 of British citizens, yet they dominate entire districts in the vicinities of their more than 1,350 mosques: 10 of them in Luton alone. Are Muslim enclaves making a contribution to a flourishing multicultural mosaic? Or are they undermining the cohesion of Britain’s civil society?

Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistani-born Anglican Bishop of Rochester, caused a rumpus by calling for an end to “‘no-go’ areas” for non-Muslims in Britain, suggesting Islam must integrate with us. He was applauded and disparaged in equal measure by faith leaders and community activists. Muslim extremists issued death threats. But where are the alleged “no-go” areas?
And how do they constitute a danger to the fabric of British society?

The majority of Muslims do not kill women for running away from brutal husbands and forced marriages, nor are they terrorists, yet moderate Muslims nevertheless appear to be creating divisive enclaves within this country as a result of routine Muslim religiosity and lifestyle. Consider the following. In Dewsbury, imams petition Mid Yorkshire Hospital NHS Trust to request nurses to turn beds of sick Muslims to face Mecca five times a day. A Muslim shop assistant at Reading’s Marks & Spencer refuses to touch a book of children’s Bible stories because it is “unclean”. In hospitals around Britain, female Muslim surgeons refuse to follow hygiene guidelines stipulating scrubbing up bare arms (a measure to combat MRSA and Clostridium difficile). In Oxford the imam of the new central mosque is requesting amplified calls to prayer, prompting Christian clergy to predict “white flight” from a city of burgeoning minarets.

The overall picture is of cumulative assertiveness, but there is evidence too of proselytising aggressiveness. A south London hospital chaplain tells me: “I created a multi-faith prayer room in a hospital I serve. The Muslim visitors left Islamic literature and prayer mats against the spirit of non-sectarianism I wanted to promote. Every time I set out holy books of other religions alongside the Koran, the non-Muslim books were chucked in the bin.” On a grander scale of missionary zeal, the Muslim group Tablighi Jamaat is proposing to build the largest mosque in Europe, for 12,000 worshippers at a time, close to the London Olympic site. The organisers aim to convert Britain to Islam.

Ed Husain, who is a PhD student at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, provides similar telling insights, having visited several Muslim cultural borderlands. He was born in Mile End in London’s East End. His father, of Pakistani origin, ran a small curry takeaway on the Commercial Road. After leaving a multi-ethnic primary school in Docklands, Ed went to an Asian Muslim monocultural secondary with predominantly Bangladeshi intake. Then he got involved in student radical Islamic movements in Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets. After teaching English as a foreign language in Syria and Saudi Arabia, he returned to Britain reconverted to a gentler brand of Sufism, which insists that Islam is a religion and not an ideology. Husain is dedicated to the idea of encouraging Muslims towards acknowledging a purely religious, rather than political, dimension of Islam. This does not mean, for him, a retreat to enclosed religiosity.

Husain’s analysis of “no-go” Muslim Britain focuses on the monocultural groups that offer few opportunities for the young to move on and out of their enclaves. “It’s absurd,” he says, “to send kids five nights a week to Koranic class, dressed in costumes only suitable for the subcontinent, to learn scripture by rote in a language they don’t understand.” Husain contends that many migrant populations of Pakistani Muslims have never really settled here: “Migrants in the past tended to sink roots. Nowadays, with cheap long-haul jet travel, Pakistanis have homes in Britain and back in Pakistan. Satellite TV and mobile phones enable families to live in this country as if they were elsewhere. They are still mentally, spiritually and even physically back in Pakistan or Bangladesh.”


The article is, overall, an exercise in justifying the potential of multiculturalism.

The problem is, Islam can not fit into 21st century society, as long as it behaves like it did 1,400 years ago.

We would be stupid to go backward, and the Islamic community appears to be dead-set against coming forward.