Fundamentalist Islam has found new home here

THE favourite mantra of the woke political class, “diversity is our strength”, now sounds increasingly hollow, as social cohesion frays under pressure from mass immigration and the failure by the state to promote real integration.

That reality was spelled out in a report this week by the Henry Jackson Society, an anti-extremism think tank, which has conducted a major survey of Muslim attitudes in Britain.

Depressingly, the extensive study shows how a fundamentalist version of Islam is in the ascendancy. No less than 46 per cent of respondents expressed their support for outlawed terror organisation Hamas, while the majority wanted a ban on any images of the Prophet Mohammed, and another third hoped to see the introduction of Sharia law in Britain.

Optimists are fond of placing their faith in education as the cure for social divisions, but in this case it is university graduates who tend to be the most hardline. There is now an increasing sense of sectarian dislocation and patriarchal oppression in parts of our country.

In Iran, huge protests by brave women against the hijab, a symbol of the regime’s authoritarianism, continue – and since 1960, one of the squares in the centre of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, has been dominated by a monumental bronze statue entitled Liberty, which depicts a woman tearing off her veil.

So what is happening over here? In Sandwell in the West Midlands, a vast, brutalist sculpture has been erected that shows a woman wearing the Islamic headscarf. “The Strength of the Hijab” is the slogan on its base.