As the former leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui was uncompromising over the Iranian fatwa imposing the death sentence on Salman Rushdie for insulting the Prophet. When Iran relaxed it in 1998, Dr Siddiqui complained they had no authority to do so. Then came 9/11, and a resurgent, politicised Islam emboldened in its quest to expand its influence in the West.


(Cover illustration by Michael Daley)


By 2005, Dr Siddiqui’s entire outlook had changed: he reflected gloomily that Islam in Britain was on a collision course with the rest of the country. It was, he mused, as if the protection afforded to Muslims to practise and proselytise every aspect of their faith — short of physical jihad — counted for little. Islam seemed to have become all about “rights and no obligations. I think, by and large, this is the direction the Muslim community is taking, leading to victimhood, a grievance culture. We don’t seem to be grasping what makes a people respectable, lovable, likeable. You know, if you are a problem person, who wants to know you?”

How prescient he was. Judging by the reaction to the latest collision between Islam and the values of British society, critical self-reflection still eludes this country’s most politically active Islamic organisations.

Last autumn a survey suggested that thousands of state primary schools had adopted the hijab as part of their official school uniform. Another survey showed that for 42 per cent of Islamic faith schools, including some that are state-run, the hijab was compulsory.

For many Muslim women, the hijab is a modesty garment historically connoting the idea that women are sexual objects for men otherwise incapable of controlling themselves. Responding to these polls, the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, wondered if little girls were being conditioned to become sexually modest before puberty to ensure they remained modest for the rest of their lives instead of allowing them an unfettered choice when old enough to make an informed decision. Were schools, especially those funded by the state, colluding in this conditioning? Was community peer pressure to conform perhaps contributing to the rise? In which case, said Ms Spielman, Ofsted could give headteachers “the confidence and strength to act”.

Individual freedom is a core British value, and the Chief Inspector is the ultimate custodian of child welfare in schools, so to most people these would seem to be perfectly reasonable questions to explore.

The polls came on the back of Dame Louise Casey’s review into integration, which found that women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage especially face “a double onslaught of gender inequality, combined with religious, cultural and social barriers preventing them from accessing even their basic rights as British residents”. In conversation Dame Louise characteristically puts it more bluntly: “The level of misogyny within some of that community was jaw-dropping.” Or as Churchill might have put it, the influence of Islam “paralyses the social development of those who follow it” because “in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property.”