‘Multiculturalism is a noble aim that has gone wrong’

Ed Husain, Tony Blair’s former adviser, visited mosques across Britain for his latest book – and found some communities increasingly cut off from Western life, hears Joe Shute

It is shortly after midday on a sunny Friday morning in Dewsbury and the residents of Savile Town are preparing for Friday prayers. The shutters roll down on shopfronts selling Islamic books, clothes and alcoholfree perfumes and a steady stream of men in robes and white cotton caps, clutching their own prayer mats due to Covid-19 regulations, walk towards the mosques dotted about this small enclave of the West Yorkshire town.

The green and white minaret of the Markazi Mosque towers over the surrounding sandstone buildings of an area named after the Yorkshire industrialist Thomas Savile. Today it is almost exclusively Muslims who live among its terraced back-to-back streets. According to the 2011 census, only 48 of the 4,033 people living here were “white British”.

Savile Town is the first port of call for Ed Husain, the writer and academic, in his book Among The Mosques: a Journey across Muslim Britain, in which he investigates the extent to which some Muslim communities are becoming separated from the rest of the UK. The 46-year-old, who previously worked as an adviser to Gordon Brown’s government and to Tony Blair after he had left office, visited some of the UK’s 2,000 mosques.

Between the ages of 16 and 21 he was attracted to a hardline version of the religion he says he encountered both at his local college in Tower Hamlets and the East London Mosque where he worshipped. He says he became increasingly radicalised and travelled across the Muslim world, living in Saudi Arabia and Syria. In 2003, while studying in Damascus, a friend blew himself up in a terrorist attack in Israel.

Since then he has become a champion of the sort of liberal values he fears are being lost in parts of Muslim Britain to an ultraorthodox interpretation of the faith – one that, he believes, is on the increase.

According to his book, within a decade (based on the ONS census of 2001–11 projections) several areas in Bradford, Blackburn, Birmingham, Leicester, Slough, Luton and some London boroughs will be Muslimmajority. By 2050, the Muslim population in Britain is estimated to be 13million. Husain’s mission to delve into the heart of those communities, however, left him profoundly depressed.

In areas such as Savile Town he fears something he calls a “quiet caliphate” is taking shape – a separate world from the rest of society; one beholden to different rules, education, identity and laws. It is a problem, he argues, that successive governments have refused to properly acknowledge.

“We can’t allow for borders to emerge within our own country,” he says. “Walk around parts of Walthamstow or Tower Hamlets, the physical walls may not be there but you feel as though you are in parts of Pakistan, India or Bangladesh.”

As we walk though the streets of Savile Town he points out even the charity shops are devoted to the “Ummah”, or Muslim community, with a generation growing up here utterly detached from British culture and values. “Multiculturalism,” he says, “was a noble aim that has gone wrong.” He makes the point that in places like Savile Town the “multi” bit is entirely missing. His modus operandi in researching the book was to arrive unannounced for Friday prayers at a mosque, ask questions, talk to strangers, read available literature and walk around the area. The Markazi Mosque in Savile Town is the European central office of a Muslim organisation called the Tableeghi Jamaat, which is the evangelical arm of the wider Deobandi movement, to which more than half of Britain’s mosques q belong. Husain likens the Tableeghis to the “male-only version ion of Jehovah’s Witnesses”, with groups known for door-to-door r-to-door proselytising.

In Dewsbury he shows ws me a shop selling miswak, a traditional tooth-cleaning ing twig made from a certain in tree, while when he visited the mosque for prayers worshippers wore a sort of leather slipper that originated in the 8th century, alongside their traditional robes. The sermon was read out in classical Arabic.

During his visit Husain ain asked a cleric why there e were no women. As he writes in the book, he was told simply: “There e can be no discussion of f there being women in the mosque. This would be ea a temptation for many.”

Troubled times: above, the Markazi mosque in Savile Town; below, Ed Husain, who visited mosques across the UK

He was recommended various books and shows me extracts from one, Guidance for a Muslim Wife. In the book, “when a woman leaves her home without her husband’s consent, then all the angels of the skies and the entire universe curse her for this act until she returns home” and “when a husband calls his wife at night to have relatio relations with her and she refuses wit without a valid reason, she is curse cursed throughout the night by th the angels.”

Such inte interpretations of Islam has, Husa Husain says, already led to catastr catastrophic consequences. Moha Mohammed Siddique Khan, ring ringleader of the July 2005 Lon London Tube bombings tha that killed 52 people, pla planned the attack from his terrace home in De Dewsbury.

In 2015 Talha Asmal, a 17 17-year-old from Savile To Town, became Britain’s yo youngest suicide bo bomber for Isil after he ble blew himself up in Iraq. Hi His best friend, Hasan Mu Munshi, also from the are area, went with him. In 200 2008 Hasan’s older bro brother, Hamad Munshi, bec became the country’s youngest younge convicted terrorist at 15 when police found directions on martyrdom, and explosives in his bedroom.

“People may be in denial but I’ve seen the line from (some) mosques to suicide bombings”, Husain says.

Segregation is the seam that runs through Husain’s book. In Bradford, he met Muslim parents who forbid their children to take part in drama and theatre, viewing them as a corrupting influence. In Blackburn he heard stories of white and Asian youths attacking one another if they strayed into either neighbourhood.

And then there is Batley, just a few miles down the road from Dewsbury, where a teacher was recently forced into hiding by death threats after showing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed in a classroom.

“We can’t let more Batleys emerge,” Husain tells me. “I have friends who are playwrights who refuse to write anything about Muslims because they are terrified of being killed.

“We can’t live in a country where we are fearful of expressing a view, opinion or art. Something within us is dying and that is what I fear.”

He warns the recent wave of anti-Semitism in Britain following the latest outbreak of hostilities between

Israel and Palestine – which included protesters accused of holding placards displaying Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic abuse shouted at Jewish people from cars – demonstrates how parts of British society are splintering into factions.

“The moment you have this communal identity you see the other communities as your enemy,” he says. “We are losing the ties that bind us together.”

This wasn’t, however, a universal experience. In some of the 10 mosques he visited – notably in Belfast and Edinburgh – he encountered the peaceful, more open, version of Islam which he hopes can displace what has been allowed to take root. Here, women and men mingle (though pray in separate rooms) and wear western clothes instead of Islamic dress. The Belfast mosque is run by women and is a place where they are tolerant of gay rights.

Of course there are many British Muslims for whom the local mosque is not such an all-consuming part of their lives as it is in places like Savile Town. There is hope, Husain says, in sharing common stories, but he warns the Government is currently “scared” of taking proper action and needs to be far more proactive.

This reluctance is partly down to the recent report into Islamophobia within the Conservative Party, which concluded last month that while the party is not institutionally racist, anti-Muslim voices do exist within it.

“To have been talking about this issue would amplify an investigation that was active,” Husain says. “Now the Conservative Party has been found not to be institutionally racist it should have the confidence of its convictions to help save the country.”

Husain is soon to move with his wife and two daughters to Washington in the US where he is a professor at Georgetown University. He describes his book as both a “love letter” and a warning to Britain before he departs. “We have got to get this thing right,” he says. “We can’t keep turning away from it.”

‘We can’t live in a country where we are fearful of expressing a view, opinion or art’

‘Something within us is dying ... we are losing the ties that bind us together’