Birmingham and Rotherham Examples Show How Radical Islam Took Hold in the U.K.

COMMENTARY

People walk through the Rotherham town center following the publication of a report that found around 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the town over a 16-year period.
People walk through the Rotherham town center following the publication of a report that found around 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the town over a 16-year period. (photo: Lynne Cameron/PA Wire URN:20760092)

Events in Iraq and Syria, and especially the murder of the young American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by the Islamic State of Syria (IS), have focused attention on Britain’s Muslims.

Some 500-700 young Muslim men from Britain are said to be among the jihadists who are involved in mass killings and torture in order to establish an Islamic state in the Middle East.

Islam is a visible and growing presence in Britain and a dominant one in sections of several major cities, including Bradford, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and London. According to the Office of National Statistics, approximately one-tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim.

At present, 4% of the British population as a whole is Muslim, but the interesting thing is the age profile: For children under 4, the figure rises to 9%.

Three major events have coalesced to forge a massive debate about the role of Islam in modern Britain.

First, a major controversy — which had been simmering for a long while — erupted in the city of Birmingham, where a number of the schools are 100% Islamic and several have fallen into the hands of supporters of extremist views, who have succeeded in ousting more moderate teachers. A promised enquiry faces immense difficulties in attempting to examine the problem.

Second, the “Rotherham Horror”: A major criminal case revealed that a number of almost exclusively Muslim men sexually abused large numbers of young white girls over a number of years in the northern town of Rotherham and that the local authorities (social workers, police, etc.) did nothing because any accusations against the men were deemed to be “racist,” and parents were even arrested when they tried to rescue their daughters from grim situations.

Third, and of course most well-known, the fighting in Iraq and Syria: Numbers of young British men have been hurrying to join the “jihadists” and bragging of their grisly exploits on the Internet.

The enthusiasm of young British Muslim men for fighting for an Islamic state, and for threatening terrorist action against Britain, has taken many commentators by surprise. It contradicts the official view that it should be assumed that all British Muslims share a basic loyalty to Britain and to British institutions and that any attempt to discuss this or to raise questions is anti-Islamic and shows evidence of racial bigotry. Thus, those who have genuine concerns about what is happening among Muslim youth have found that they have had no voice.

Moderate Muslims, loyal to Britain and concerned for the future, have highlighted the failure of successive governments to recognize the dangers posed by radical Islamic campaigners in mosques, youth groups and schools. On July 11, moderate British Muslim imams produced a video denouncing the actions of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Birmingham Member of Parliament Khalid Mahmoud told the Birmingham Mail newspaper in April that hard-line Muslims seemed to be "trying to import their views into classrooms and the day-to-day running of the schools.”

“But the majority of kids are Sunni mainstream Muslims," he added. “It is an attempt at indoctrination.”

Mahmood chairs a parliamentary group concerned with tackling terrorism and said in August that at least 1,500 young British Muslims have been recruited by extremists fighting in Iraq and Syria in the last three years: “If you look across the whole of the country, and the various communities involved, 500 going over each year would be a conservative estimate,” he told the Mail.

One difficulty is knowing what to do about preachers in mosques who whip up anti-British, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish feeling. There are some 2,000 mosques across Britain — they are now a standard feature of the British urban landscape. There is no official or formal structure linking them: Any group of Muslims can simply join together to fund the building of a mosque and become the “elders” who run it. An imam is not appointed by or accredited to any central authority in the way that Christian ministers of various denominations are.

Recent years have seen large sums of public money given to Islamic groups claiming to represent the “Muslim community,” only for it to become clear later that a group is merely one powerful faction and that the funds have been used to promote fanatical viewpoints or to disappear into salaries for various campaigns.

Islamic immigration to Britain began in the 1960s, and when, in the late 1970s, members of Parliament began to express concern over the numbers of people settling from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to ask for the true figures to be released, they were denounced as racial bigots. It became clear in the 1990s that the figures from the 1960s and ’70s had indeed been massaged, but by then, it was necessary simply to try to work out ways in which Muslims and non-Muslims could live together in a country that for centuries had been overwhelmingly Christian.

The number of church-attending Christians in Britain has been falling steadily for decades. Catholics now form the largest single denomination, if counted by church attendance. There are some 4 million Catholics in England and Wales, of which just under 1 million attend Mass weekly.

For all of its recorded history, Britain has been regarded as a Christian country: The Church was first planted during the Roman occupation, and the faith has been nurtured by successive waves of missionaries and saints. On maps showing the spread of the world’s religions, it is recognized as Christian. But with the rapid growth of Islam and declining church attendance, the 21st century looks set to see a major challenge — something which is very much in the minds and hearts of all who are committed to the New Evagelization.

Joanna Bogle is an author and journalist

who writes from London.

Her blog is Auntie Joanna Writes.