For two weeks in mid-December, I rode public transport throughout parts of England. I took the Tube to move through London, and used the National Rail service to travel to Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester, and then back to London before returning home. On every trip, I repeatedly heard a disembodied female voice over the loudspeaker telling passengers to alert the authorities if they see anything suspicious. The message ends with the reassuring line: “See it. Say it. Sorted.”
As an American Anglophile, it grieves me to say this, but I don’t believe a word of it. I wasn’t riding public transport in England to visit Christmas markets but to visit mosques that have a documented track record of undermining what Brits call “social cohesion.” The problem hasn’t gone away.
On December 7, my second day in England, I sat through a midday prayer service at the Islamic Centre of London, a mosque with a long history of promoting pro-Iranian propaganda. I watched in quiet disbelief as a Shiite imam led his congregants in sonorous prayer under the watchful eye of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who peered down from a portrait hanging on the wall above the worship space. His grim visage peered off to the side of the portrait as if to get a glimpse of the death and destruction the regime he founded was going to inflict on the Middle East in the years after his death.
Officials at the mosque made no attempt to stop me as I took pictures to document the presence of Khomeini’s portrait on the wall. I had hoped to ask the mosque’s leaders why they venerate a man responsible for founding an oppressive and murderous regime, but they didn’t respond to my queries, even after the mosque’s imam—whose hand I shook—said they would.
Maybe I’m being naïve, but I would think that a mosque that suffered a public relations hit in 2020 for eulogizing Qassam Soleimani, an Iranian general responsible for the deaths of British soldiers, would have taken Khomeini’s image down, but no. Apparently, ICE’s leadership learned nothing from having their institution placed under the receivership of an interim manager by the UK’s Charity Commission in 2022.
The following day, I visited London Central Mosque near Regent’s Park and shook the hand of the imam who had just led a prayer service. He seemed like a nice man, which was a relief, given that in years past, teachers at the mosque had promoted an official Saudi text calling for the execution of apostates and gays. For a while, the mosque endured a lot of bad publicity as a result of documentaries about the extremism it promoted, but the problem has not, as they say, been sorted.
While at the mosque’s bookstore, I purchased a copy of The Modernist Menace to Islam: A Muslim Critique of Modern -Isms by American Islamist Daniel Haqiqatjou, who has defended the modern-day practice of slavery and the forcible marriage of underage girls. In his book, Haqiqatjou declares that “Islam does not respect freedom of religion,” that “only tyrants want to replace Sharia with religious freedom,” and that “all branches and varieties of feminism are anathema to Islam.” He also defends the practice of triple talaq, or “instant” divorce. This practice has been banned in Muslim countries because it often leaves women abruptly abandoned by their husbands financially destitute.
Haqiqatjou clearly has it in for the West, declaring in his book that “Incidents of prepubescent elementary school boys gang raping their female classmates are a growing phenomenon in many Western cities.” (Somebody ought to tell Haqiqatjou about the grooming gangs in places like Rochdale and Telford.)
Islamist troublemakers have specialized in portraying themselves as victims and their non-Muslim neighbors as evil oppressors. This tendency has reached an absurd level in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where a 500-year-old pub—where I spent my second-to-last night in England—has been forced to defend itself against a lawsuit filed by a man who spent almost five years in prison for broadcasting jihadist propaganda online. The pub in question, the Saracen’s Head Inn, has allegedly hurt the poor man’s feelings by displaying the image of an Arab or Turkish man in traditional headdress over its entrance. Ridiculous.
The resentment fueled and stoked by Islamist leaders in England has a real impact on intergroup relations in the country. On Wednesday, December 11, I was chased out of a restaurant in the Birmingham neighborhood of Sparkbrook by a Pakistani Muslim who screamed at me for asserting that Hamas raped women during the October 7 massacre. “Did you see the rapes?” he asked me. (So much for “Believe all women.”) Prior to his explosion, he told me that he had no problems with Jews, but merely disliked “Zionists.” He also declared that “America is responsible for everything on this planet” and that America is controlled by Zionists. He ended the conversation by telling me to “get the f--k out” of the restaurant. His friend, a fellow Muslim of Kurdish background, used his phone to videotape me as I left the building.
I underwent a similar trial again on December 17, after attendees at a prayer service at the Al Furqan Mosque and Islamic Center in Manchester told me how much they hated Israel. Before a prayer service during which the sheikh sat in a chair draped with a red and white keffiyeh, worshippers heaped abuse on Israel and Zionist Jews. For example, one congregant, a man in his thirties, declared, “The population of Gaza is becoming nonexistent,” and that the “mass genocide needs to stop.” Another congregant declared that Zionists controlled the media.
The hostility didn’t stop with Israel or “Zionists.” When one elderly attendee, affectionately called “Uncle” by his admirers (and who emigrated from the British Protectorate of Somaliland in 1960), declared his allegiance to the Union Jack and to the King and Queen, other members of the mosque shook their heads in contempt. The man called Uncle was so ashamed of the contempt for England shown by his fellow worshippers at the mosque he asked me to remove the pages containing their quotes out of my reporter’s notebook.
Our conversation was interrupted when the property manager for the mosque insisted I follow him into the mosque’s office, shut the door behind me, and started berating me for coming into the property uninvited. (In fact, I had been invited to interview the man from Somaliland by one of the worshippers at the mosque.) As I got up to leave, I discovered the door was deadbolted behind me. (A similar event happened at Finsbury Park Mosque in London in 2014.) It took some effort, but eventually, I prevailed on the property manager to open the door and let me out of the office. He videotaped me with his phone as I left the property. (Rumor has it I’m a hit on a local WhatsApp group in Manchester.)
Whether government officials want to admit it or not, the problem of Islamist extremism has not been “sorted” in England. It’s time to mind the gap between the followers of extremist imams and their neighbors in British society—and the norms they refuse to follow. It’s widening and no one seems to be able to point to the way out.
