Last week a Labour MP stood up in the British parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions and demanded the implementation of Islamic blasphemy laws. Sir Keir Starmer was asked by Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley MP Tahir Ali if he would “commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.”
It was intriguing to note how selectively Ali used language; although advocating for a ban on criticism of “Abrahamic” faiths, the MP seemed focused on punishing those who opposed a specific religion. Speaking in the House of Commons, Ali mentioned “Islamophobia Awareness Month”. He specifically stated that he wanted to make the desecration of the Qur’an a crime, referencing a recent resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council that denounced such behaviour.
Hearing a politician in the twenty-first century call for the reinstatement of blasphemy laws was unsettling, but the Prime Minister’s response was just as concerning. Keir Starmer gave Ali’s demand tacit approval rather than a firm rejection of a Sharia-style speech code, which is incompatible with a liberal democracy in the West. “We are committing to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including, of course, Islamophobia in all its forms,” he said in response to Ali in his usual managerial and somewhat robotic manner.
The campaign to ban discussion of Islam did not stop there. Another MP asked the PM to consider adopting the definition of Islamophobia provided by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG). The APPG defines it as follows: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The report aims to debunk several alleged “myths” such as the idea that Muslims are prone to terrorism or are accused of being “sex groomers.”
If this definition of Islamophobia were officially adopted, it would raise unsettling questions as to what would become a crime. Would it be illegal to criticise Hamas, Al Qaeda, or Isis? Critics could hesitate to draw attention to cultural practices like honour killings and forced marriage, or even to challenge the idea of Islamophobia in general.
Islam is not a race, it is a belief system. There are roughly two billion Muslims worldwide, representing a wide range of ethnic groups. When you criticise Islam, you are criticising an idea rather than a racial demographic. One way the state can suppress dissent is by conflating race with belief. Similar to the official hate crime guidance’s abstract definition of hate, vague, tautological, and misleading definitions of key words can result in police wasting a lot of time chasing down alleged “criminals” when they should be investigating actual crimes committed by actual criminals.
Hate crimes operate under the pretence of perception-based recording. Anyone can file a claim for offence on another person’s behalf. In 2016, a freedom of information request revealed that more than 25 per cent of Islamophobic hate crimes that London’s Metropolitan Police have recorded are against non-Muslims or people of unknown faith. Because these terms are so poorly defined, it is possible that Muslims can also be Islamophobic toward non-Muslims. Furthermore, Muslims may discover that they themselves harbour anti-Islamic sentiments toward other Muslims. In 2018, an Asian man made the joke that his Asian friend appeared to look like a terrorist in a drawing. The incident was reported to the police by a passer-by and recorded as a non-crime hate incident, even though the man was not offended.
I want to offer a partial defence of Ali. To some extent, the politician is ideologically captured by the electorate. Tahir Ali is responding to the pressures of an electoral system that, in Britain’s major cities, favours pandering to specific ethnic or religious groups. Muslims make up 57.5 per cent of the electorate in Ali’s Birmingham constituency of Hall Green and Moseley. In other words, he is representing a large section of his voters. According to a survey conducted earlier this year, 52 per cent of Muslims in the UK support laws banning the display of cartoons and images of the Prophet Mohammed within the next twenty years.
Although blasphemy laws were officially abolished in 2008, Britain has had a de facto blasphemy law in place for years. A 14-year-old boy with autism was suspended from a West Yorkshire school last year for allegedly damaging a copy of the Qur’an. The boy’s mother was humiliated: she had to appear at a nearby mosque and beg the local community for forgiveness while wearing a scarf over her head. It was not an outlier. A teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced to go on the run in 2021 after provoking the local Muslim community by displaying a picture of the Prophet Mohammed during a religious studies lesson.
Muslims themselves have even punished Muslims for expressing critical opinions about Islam. Interethnic conflict between Sunni and Shia erupted in the streets in 2022 after cinemas banned The Lady of Heaven, a movie that portrayed the rise of Islam from a Shia perspective, offending Britain’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population.
This is the problem when you give in to identity politics and treat people as members of a community or collective in accordance with their position on the progressive stack—an identity group endowed with protected characteristics rather than on the basis of their individual merits.
This is an immigration issue, though, and not just an issue based on identity. Britain opened its doors and imported every form of sectarianism during the past twenty years. This is the reason why so many politicians speak about Gaza in the Commons, why huge pro-Palestine protests line the streets every other weekend, and why MPs are now calling for a return to a 7th-century ideology that is based on disregard for women and disregard for the democratic ideal of equality before the law.
We in Britain were warned. In 2009, Christopher Hitchens said: ‘The next thing [is] you’ll be told you can’t complain because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred for example or bigotry whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.’
The British should have listened and acted sooner.
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