The Architecture of Fear

The fence came down first. Then the bricks. By the evening of 30 July 2024, the Southport Islamic Society Mosque—a modest brick building on a side street in a Victorian seaside town better known for candy floss than communal violence—was surrounded by several hundred men who believed they were avenging the murders of three little girls.

The attacker who had stabbed those children the day before at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class was seventeen years old. His name was Axel Rudakubana. He had been born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents, raised in a churchgoing family, and was neither Muslim nor a migrant nor a refugee. None of that mattered. Within hours of the attack, a fabricated name—Ali al-Shakati—had been pushed across X, alongside the claim that the attacker had crossed the Channel in a small boat. A single post carrying this fiction reached nearly seven million views before the weekend was out. The name was an invention. The mosque was real. The men outside it were real. And the pattern they enacted—grief weaponised, Muslims scapegoated, an entire community rendered liable for a crime it had nothing to do with—was older than the riot, older than the internet, older than the word Islamophobia.

The Merseyside chief constable, Serena Kennedy, would later tell MPs that she had wanted to release information about Rudakubana’s religion on 31 July, to disarm the lie. She said the Crown Prosecution Service had instructed her not to. By then the rioting had spread to Hartlepool, Rotherham, Manchester, Sunderland, Hull, Belfast—a wave of anti-Muslim violence unlike anything Britain had seen since the 1980s.

For the first time since the body began counting, Muslim men reported being targeted more often than Muslim women.

What happened in Southport, and what followed, was not an eruption. It was a performance—a manufactured one. Britain, like much of Europe, has spent three decades building the emotional infrastructure that allows a dead child’s name to be laid at Muslims’ feet. That infrastructure has a politics, a set of funders, a class of entrepreneurs, and by now an international character. It no longer belongs to the fringe. It operates in the comment pages of respectable newspapers, on the benches of elected parliaments and, since January 2025, in the Oval Office.

The argument of this essay is that what we are watching is not a spike in hate crime, nor a failure of integration, nor even—despite the symptoms—a simple resurgence of the far right. It is the slow capture of the political centre by a reactionary alliance that uses Muslims as the organising figure of its fears. British multiculturalism is being dismantled not by legislation but by legitimacy—by the steady migration of rhetoric that twenty years ago belonged to the British National Party into the cadences of cabinet ministers, broadsheet columnists, and the White House itself.

Protestors march with British and Israeli flags during the Unite the Kingdom March organized by Tommy Robinson to silence solidarity with Palestine and divide communities through racism and Islamophobia © IMAGO / Zuma Press Wire / Loredana Sangiuliano

The Surge and Its Symptoms

If you want to understand the psychic weight of a single year, ask a mosque caretaker what he dreams about. In the months after Southport, Muslim civil society organisations across Britain were fielding a volume of calls from ordinary worshippers—pensioners, shopkeepers, students—who had begun making small, private adjustments. Leaving prayers early. Changing routes home. Telling teenage daughters not to wear the hijab on the bus.

The numbers confirm the texture. In 2024, Tell MAMA, the monitoring organization founded in 2012, verified 5,837 anti-Muslim incidents. That is the highest annual figure in the organization’s history, up from 2,201 two years earlier—a rise of more than 160 per cent. Offline assaults, discrimination, and vandalism all climbed. For the first time since the body began counting, Muslim men reported being targeted more often than Muslim women, an inversion its director Iman Atta attributes to the intensifying stereotype of the Muslim male as a security threat. Online, Tell MAMA recorded a 1,619 per cent surge in reports immediately after 7 October 2023; the platform its researchers describe as most “toxic” is X.

Home Office figures tell the same story in institutional language. In the year to March 2025, 45 per cent of all religious hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales were directed at Muslims—a 19 per cent increase on the previous year, and the highest proportion since the statistics began.

What changed over the last decade is not primarily the existence of such sentiment, but its address. In the early 2000s, the framing of Muslims as an alien presence, incompatible with British life, incubating domestic terror, was largely the property of the tabloids. It is now carried by the comment pages of the Telegraph and the Spectator, the podcasts and prime-time shows of GB News, the Twitter feeds of sitting members of parliament. The rhetoric migrated from the red-top fringe to the broadsheet centre without any detectable change in content. Only the fonts improved.

Consider “British values”, a phrase that has functioned for nearly two decades as a polite device for designating Muslims the internal other. In its Prevent-era heyday it was a pedagogical instrument: schools were obliged to teach it, charities to profess it, mosques to demonstrate it. Nobody ever asked whether the Sikh temple or the synagogue or the parish church held British values. The question was reserved. When Keir Starmer’s Labour government came to power in July 2024, it inherited this architecture and, under the pressure of rioting and polling, chose not to dismantle it but to refine it. A working group chaired by the former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve was established in February 2025 to define Islamophobia. Over a year later, in March 2026, the government settled on a preferred term: “anti-Muslim hostility”. Not Islamophobia. Hostility. The linguistic choice is small and telling. It avoids naming the thing.

This is what I have elsewhere called defensive secularism—a political grammar that treats Muslim difference as inherently dangerous to liberal order, and that licenses the state to manage Muslims not as citizens but as a problem to be contained. Defensive secularism is not the rhetoric of the street. It is the rhetoric of the chairman, the columnist, the review committee. It is how organised anti-Muslim politics enters the bloodstream of centrist institutions without ever being mistaken for what it is.

The distance from a post on X that fabricates “Ali al-Shakati” to a parliamentary working group that cannot bring itself to say Islamophobia may look great. It is not. Both are products of the same political economy, in which Muslims are useful as symbols precisely because they are available: legible, numerous, poorly defended, and unable to retaliate in the currencies of influence the system recognizes.

The New Alliance: Far Right, Zionism, Hindutva

On 13 September 2025, an estimated 110,000 people—the largest far-right mobilization in British history, according to Hope not Hate—assembled in central London for a rally called Unite the Kingdom. It was organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the street agitator better known as Tommy Robinson. It ended with twenty-six police officers injured and at least twenty-five arrests. Among the international guests was Avi Yemini, an Australian-Israeli far-right influencer long associated with anti-Muslim content. At one point a voice from the crowd shouted him down—Out with the Zionist rats!—and Yemini’s team hurried away.

The moment captured, in miniature, a tension that will define the coming decade. The new reactionary international has a Muslim problem that unites it, and a Jewish problem that divides it. What unites it is stronger.

What has happened since roughly 2015, and what accelerated sharply with Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, is the consolidation of a political alliance that twenty years ago would have seemed improbable. Far-right European nationalists, Hindutva organizations in India and its diaspora, and an increasingly hard-right Zionism now coordinate across borders—on funding, on digital infrastructure, on policy lobbying—around a single proposition: that Muslims are a civilizational threat to be contained. The partnership is not opportunistic. It is structural.

American organizations like the Middle East Forum have, for years, funded European anti-Muslim campaigners, including early backers of Robinson himself.

Each of the three movements defines itself through a constitutive outside, and in each case that outside is the Muslim. The European populist requires the Muslim migrant. The Hindutva ideologue requires the Muslim Indian. The revisionist Zionist requires the Muslim Palestinian. This is why the alliance holds even when, as at Robinson’s rally, it produces embarrassing domestic frictions. The shared object—the Muslim as negation—is stronger than the internal disagreements about Jews, caste, or Christian identity.

Follow the infrastructure. American organisations like the Middle East Forum have, for years, funded European anti-Muslim campaigners, including early backers of Robinson himself. Hindu nationalist networks aligned with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have built influential diaspora lobbies in Britain, pressing against the recognition of both Islamophobia and caste discrimination. And across British public life a striking institutional asymmetry has hardened. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism, for all the controversy around its application to speech about Israel, has been adopted by governments, universities, football clubs, and most of the major political parties. Islamophobia, by contrast, remains contested—its very name fought over, its parameters unsettled, its proposed definitions repeatedly delayed.

The comparison is not an argument about the relative seriousness of the two hatreds. Antisemitism is rising in Britain, and rising fast. Hate crimes against Jewish people more than doubled in the year to March 2024, and the climb continued into 2025. British Jews report fear in synagogues, on campuses, in the aftermath of demonstrations. It is also true, and should be said, that some British Muslims hold less positive views of their Jewish compatriots than of other minority communities—less out of theological conviction than out of plain demographic distance. Britain’s Jewish community is small, fewer than 300,000 people, concentrated in a handful of boroughs. The British Muslim population is approaching four million, heavily concentrated in some of the poorest wards of some of the poorest cities in England. In most of the country, the two communities simply do not meet. Low contact is a product of geography and class, not of hatred—but it is a soil in which hatred grows more easily. Rising Islamophobia does not cancel rising antisemitism. It runs alongside it, and sometimes feeds it.

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK. © IMAGO / Zuma Press Wire / Thomas Krych

The definitional asymmetry, then, is not about whose suffering matters. It is about political capital—about which causes Westminster has learned to take seriously, and which it has learned to manage. What the Grieve working group eventually produced in March 2026—a definition of  “anti-Muslim hostility” rather than Islamophobia—reflected the terrain more than the capacities of the people in the room. Its members are experienced political operators known to anyone working in this space; they were negotiating in a political environment that had already narrowed around them. A government nervous of the free-speech lobby. A press that had pre-emptively framed any recognition of Islamophobia as an assault on the right to criticize religion. A working group whose membership came under sustained public attack before it had produced a word. Those who sat at that table were not dupes, and they were not played. They were doing what serious people always do in such rooms: judging how much of the desired could be made politically survivable, and settling on the most. What they secured is what they judged achievable, and it is more than nothing. The retreat—if that is what it is—belongs not to them but to the country whose political centre made that ceiling the ceiling.

The Trump administration’s second term has operated as a detonator. On his first day in office, 20 January 2025, the president signed Executive Order 14161—“Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”—which civil rights lawyers immediately recognized as the old Muslim ban in longer trousers. By June 2025 a formal travel ban targeting nationals from nineteen countries, most of them Muslim-majority, was in effect. The order itself was less consequential than the signal it sent European parties: the civilizational framing of Islam had been rehabilitated at the commanding heights of Western power. What Nigel Farage had been saying about young British Muslims failing to “subscribe to British values” was now policy in Washington.

It is tempting to read all of this as a revival of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. It is not—or not quite. Huntington imagined blocs. What has emerged is something both smaller and more sinister: a reactionary international whose members share neither territory nor theology, only an enemy. The Muslim, in this imaginary, is not a neighbour or a citizen or a worshipper. He is the glue—the figure against whom the otherwise incompatible projects of English nationalism, Hindu majoritarianism, and maximalist Zionism can find a shared grammar.

This is why Reform UK, which took 4.1 million votes at the 2024 general election—the largest far-right vote share in British history—has topped national polling for more than a year. Farage is not merely a domestic phenomenon. He is a node. His party’s councillors circulate Britain First memes; its canvassers, caught by Channel 4’s undercover cameras, describe Islam as “the most disgusting cult out”; its MPs push the prime minister to ban the burqa. A British Muslim chairman, Zia Yusuf, resigns, citing the trajectory. The scholar Arun Kundnani has argued for years that the domestic and geopolitical wars on Muslims are two halves of one project. Watching European populism, Hindutva diaspora networks, and a hardening right-wing Zionism operate in parallel across the same digital ecosystems and conference circuits, it is increasingly difficult to disagree.

What It Costs Multiculturalism

In a community hall in Bradford last winter, a group of British Muslim women in their late twenties sat over cups of tea and argued—respectfully, but with feeling—about whether they still believed in multiculturalism. Their mothers had taken it for granted: a guarantee of the right to be fully British and fully Muslim. The younger women were less sure. One said she had spent her career code-switching and no longer saw the point. Another said the point was her children. None of them felt the state was still an honest broker.

The tired question—has multiculturalism failed?—obscures the more important one. Multiculturalism in Britain was never a single thing. It was at least two. One was a lived practice: mixed neighbourhoods, workplaces, classrooms, marriages. The other was an official discourse: minority recognition, funding streams, community liaison, state acknowledgement. The first survives; in most English cities, it is simply the texture of ordinary life. The second has been hollowed out, methodically, for twenty years, and replaced by the thin imperative of integration—which, read carefully, means assimilation to a national identity that has been narrowed precisely to exclude the Muslim.

The consequences for Muslim civil society are specific and severe. Mosque councils, advocacy groups, youth organizations, and women’s networks occupy a peculiar double position. They are hyper-visible when construed as security threats—when Prevent wants a conversation, when counter-extremism funding is distributed, when a minister needs a photograph with a “moderate”. They are invisible when they attempt to function as ordinary political actors: demanding that a mosque attack be treated as a hate crime, say, or that a local councillor stop sharing Britain First content. I have elsewhere described the people who occupy this double bind as subaltern security voices—legitimate in the hearing of power only when they can be conscripted into power’s preferred story about themselves.

There is also a generational question. The trajectory of British Muslim civic expectation over three generations is instructive. Grandparents came with the belief that work and law-abiding citizenship would be sufficient. Parents believed, sometimes bitterly, that the next generation would be accepted as full Britons. The grandchildren—the current cohort of twentysomethings—have grown up with Prevent referrals at school, stop-and-search in the park, and a prime ministerial vocabulary that treats “extremism” as a Muslim adjective. They were raised to believe civic belonging could be earned by contribution, and have discovered that the same contribution has become the condition of their suspicion.

The result is an asymmetry of expectation. Young Muslims do not ask to be celebrated; they ask, increasingly, only that the terms of belonging be the same as those applied to their classmates. The sociological data on British Muslim trust in police, parliament, and the press has declined steadily since roughly 2015, and fell further during the Southport summer. A democracy cannot thrive when the young citizens of a particular community are systematically encouraged to suspect that their citizenship is conditional.

There is a democratic bill here that no state has yet learned to pay: the demand that minorities continually perform their loyalty to a polity that refuses them the reciprocal performance of welcome. When commentators ask whether British Muslims are integrating, they are asking the wrong people. The question is whether Britain is integrating with itself—with its own multicultural reality, with the promises it once made and is now quietly walking back.

Tackling It—Beyond the Usual Suspects

What, then, is to be done? The answer cannot come from the counter-narrative industry—the constellation of state-funded programmes, moderate Muslim promotions, and deradicalisation initiatives that have, over two decades, treated Muslim citizens as a suspect population requiring management. That project has failed on its own terms. It has produced neither the security it promised nor the trust it required, and it has persistently exacerbated the conditions it claims to address.

Four kinds of work seem more promising.

The first is media reform—not of the regulatory variety, which invites state content control, but of ownership. British public discourse about Muslims is shaped by a handful of outlets concentrated in a handful of hands. An editorially diverse press, genuinely accountable to the communities it covers, would not remove prejudice, but it would deny prejudice its current platforms.

© IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire / Ali Habib

The second is security-sector reform. Prevent, now in its second decade, has failed to justify its securitised approach to ordinary civic life—the teacher referring a child who has mentioned Palestine, the librarian reporting the student who reads the wrong book. What is needed is a radical de-securitisation of the relationship between the state and British Muslims: treating them, for policy purposes, as citizens first.

The third is political representation, which means more than ethnic tokenism at the top of the parties. It means power-sharing in constituencies, candidate selections, and committee structures. A democratic politics in which Muslim voices are heard only when they can be packaged as loyal is not a democratic politics.

The grandchildren—the current cohort of twentysomethings—have grown up with Prevent referrals at school, stop-and-search in the park, and a prime ministerial vocabulary that treats “extremism” as a Muslim adjective.

The fourth is the hardest. Transnational solidarity networks must do, for liberal pluralism, what the reactionary international has so efficiently done for its opposite. Progressive Jewish, Muslim, Dalit, Palestinian, Sikh, and Christian coalitions—uncomfortable, coalitional, imperfect, necessary. When half a million people marched through central London in March 2026 in the largest anti-racist mobilization the country had seen in a generation, they demonstrated that the constituency for such a politics exists. It has not yet been given a vehicle.

Above all, the work of rebuilding legitimacy cannot be carried by minorities alone. Dominant groups must do the work of unlearning the supremacy they have been encouraged to mistake for civic feeling. An asymmetry of effort, in which one side carries the burden and the other takes the credit, is not sustainable. The democratic load must be shared.

Return to the mosque in Southport. A year after the riot, as colleagues at Hyphen reported, the Southport Islamic Society was still there: windows replaced, worshippers still arriving for Friday prayers, the imam still greeting children in the car park. Local non-Muslims, appalled by what had happened on their streets, had raised funds for the repairs. The mosque’s resilience was, in one sense, a story of communal recovery. In another, it was a reminder of the bill the state has quietly outsourced to those least able to pay it.

The Trump era and its European analogues have not revealed that diversity cannot work. They have revealed that the political centre—in Washington, in Westminster, in Paris and Berlin—has been unwilling to defend diversity against organized reaction. The question before us is not whether communities can coexist. On most streets of most British towns, they already do. The question is whether the state will at last stop privileging those who profit from dividing them.

The fence in Southport has been rebuilt. Whether the society around it can be is a different question—and it belongs to all of us.