In February, the UK government appointed a working group to define “anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia”, with the aim of completing the work by the end of August. In the summer, Conservative MP Nick Timothy and a group of like-minded groups campaigned against such a definition, saying it would impede the free speech rights of people who want to criticize Islam.
Since then, the government has been cowering in silence and delay. Last week, the BBC published a report suggesting that its definition should not use the word Islamophobia at all, choosing instead “anti-Muslim hostility.”
This is wrong. Hatred of Islam is at the heart of racism against Muslims. Although the British state does not even name Islamophobia, Muslims face unprecedented levels of danger. The UK government’s unwillingness to name and tackle Islamophobia is scandalous, but mainstream media has paid little attention to it.
Prior to the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the number of attacks against Muslims reported in England and Wales was already high, reaching 3,432. In the year to March 2024, this proportion increased by 13 per cent, and by March 2025 it increased by a further 19 per cent. Due to changes to crime records by the Metropolitan Police, these latest figures do not include London, so the increase is likely to be even larger.
Latest data shows that without London, 24% of religious hate crimes would have targeted Jews and 44% against Muslims. Additionally, Muslims are consistently more likely to be victims of assault, stalking, and harassment.
In some ways, it’s a miracle that no one was killed in the Islamophobic attacks in Britain over the past two years. The mob violence that followed the killing of three girls by non-Muslim assailants in Southport in the summer of 2024 was characterized by the targeting of mosques from the outset. There have been several attacks on mosques this year, including arson. In December, police in Northern Ireland arrested several members of the so-called Irish Defense Forces in connection with a plot to attack a mosque and migrant homes in Galway, Republic of Ireland.
In the face of rising hate crimes, the British government has campaigned resolutely against anti-Semitism, but rightly so, without devoting the same amount of political capital to protecting Muslims. The state’s approach to defining both forms of racism makes this heterogeneity very clear.
In December 2016, the UK adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which is highly controversial because it confuses anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. In contrast, the UK government has dragged its feet in adopting a definition of Islamophobia.
The draft definition published by the BBC on December 15 does not mention Islamophobia, but it is so inadequate that it is actually dangerous because it gives a blank check to those who want to attack Islam. This lack of protection was inevitable. In the working group’s terms of reference, the government asserted “the enduring right of British citizens to criticize, express disgust with, or insult the beliefs and practices of their religion and/or its followers”.
Imagine for a moment that the government specified that the definition of anti-Semitism was to allow insulting Judaism. Even a cursory understanding of the history of anti-Semitism makes it clear that hostility towards Jews and Judaism has been inseparable for thousands of years. From medieval blood libel, which accused Jews of ritually killing Christian children, to today’s “swapping theory,” which holds that Jews are orchestrating the corruption of the so-called “white race.”
Similarly, the persecution of Muslims by the West, from the Middle Ages to the present, has been intrinsically linked to and driven by opposition to Islam. Both during the Reformation in Europe in the 16th century and during the colonization of North Africa and Asia in the 19th century, Western thinkers and political leaders commonly viewed Islam as an inherently imperialist and violent religion, dedicated to world domination through the means of holy war and conspiracy.
In the 16th century, German theologian Martin Luther considered both Jews and Muslims to be “fanatics” – violent revolutionaries inspired by religion. In the 18th century, the French scholar Alexandre Delaille wrote, “When the government is absolutely based on religion, as in the case of Muslims, fanaticism is directed mainly outward, making this people an enemy of humanity.”
The leaders of the French and British empires were obsessed with the idea that Islam created an inherent potential for revolutionary violence and that it had to be prevented through surveillance, censorship, and a politics of “moderation.”
The lasting influence of this concept of Islam as a source of violent conspiracies can be easily traced in Western countries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, most evident since the beginning of the “war on terror” in the early 2000s. These ideas transcend the political realm and have been at the heart of Britain’s immigration panic since 2015, when war and the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) prompted an exodus of refugees from the Middle East.
Hatred of Islam is based on centuries of Western thinking that views Islam as an existential threat to Christian civilization, and is the root of a range of Islamophobic ideas. That is, all Muslims are potential terrorists, oppressors of women, sexual predators, and obsessive theocrats.
In this context, claiming that Islam is not the subject of vitriolic criticism that hates Muslims is actually promoting racism. It gives a clean slate to those who attack Islam with burning passion, the hostility that incites verbal and physical violence against Muslims. Celebrating such attacks as an expression of “free speech” glorifies hatred.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
