Vodka & Seledka 🇬🇧@seledka_vodka
Excellent article. Here are a few builds.
First, it must be pointed out that Islam - not some extreme variant, but bog-standard orthodox Islam as preached and practised in Britain - rejects any notion of integration or ideological compromise with other religions or cultural norms that contradict its edicts. The doctrine of al-wala' wal-bara' commands loyalty to the faith and disavowal of non-Muslim ways.
The Prophet's own hadith warns that "whoever imitates a people is one of them." Muslims are expected to reject man-made structures and "innovation," and to accept the barbarities of the Quran and the Hadith as divinely sanctioned prescriptions for how life must be lived. No radical fringe is required to reach these conclusions. The mainstream canon gets you there on its own.
Second, when Muslims form a majority in a territory, they are divinely instructed to impose Islamic rule on everyone. If you belong to the "people of the book" - another Abrahamic faith - you may be permitted to live, provided you pay a poll tax (jizya) to the Muslim rulers in a state of, as the Quran specifies, humiliation. Ibn Kathir's commentary on this verse is unambiguous: the jizya exists to demonstrate the subjugation of non-Muslims to Islamic authority.
If you are a Hindu, Islam considers you a pagan, and even under the most lenient schools of jurisprudence, your status under Islamic rule is one of codified subjugation - discriminatory taxation, legal inequality, prohibition on building temples, inability to testify against a Muslim in court, and periodic persecution.
The "tolerant" version of Islam is tolerance in the sense of "we will permit you to exist under conditions we dictate," not tolerance in the sense of equal standing before the law. As for leaving Islam, the Prophet's instruction is plain: "whoever changes his religion, kill him." All four Sunni schools of jurisprudence agree. Abu Bakr's wars against apostates were fought within a year of the Prophet's death.
The only reason we are not all living under these arrangements is that Muslims are - for now - a minority in Britain.
Third, public Islamic prayer is, as Nick says, political - and has been since the Prophet's time. Islam does not recognise a distinction between religious and political life. The Friday sermon was historically the platform from which caliphs proclaimed authority and issued edicts. The call to prayer is prescribed to be heard by the community. The separation of church and state is a uniquely Reformation-driven Western achievement, and Islam explicitly repudiates it. Communal public prayer in a non-Muslim land is therefore an assertion of presence, of dominance, and of rejection of the norms of the host nation - whether every individual participant intends it as such or not.
Fourth, we owe precisely zero explanations for why we resent this. Zero. We do not have to be rational about it. We do not have to draw comparisons with other religions. Any explanation we give is the right one, because it is our land, and we govern it as we see fit.
But I will give you my reasons.
While I am an atheist and regard all religion as a collection of mostly rubbish - and religious belief as a species of derangement - Britain's culture and values have been steeped in Christianity. This includes our laws, which are inseparable from our culture. We may not be as Christian as we were fifty years ago, but anyone born in this country who was not shielded from it (as a great many Muslims are, thanks to their parents) will have absorbed some of Christianity's gifts into their cultural DNA.
Islam is the antithesis of all of this. Its canonical texts prescribe the striking of disobedient wives, value a woman's testimony at half a man's, mandate amputation for theft, flogging for fornication, and stoning for adultery. Its most authenticated hadith collections contain explicit antisemitism - including a prophecy that Muslims will hunt and kill Jews at the end of times, with even the stones and trees calling out to betray those in hiding. It is violently hostile to other faiths, to non-belief, and to apostasy. It rejects secular democratic rule as a matter of doctrine. It has resisted reformation for fourteen centuries. And it has produced decades of relentless terrorism - against us and, by an even greater margin, against fellow Muslims. From the Algerian civil war to the sectarian slaughter in Iraq, from Boko Haram to the Taliban, from the Peshawar school massacre to the Manchester Arena bombing, the body count is staggering, and the majority of the dead are Muslim. The violence is structural. It is doctrinal. Western foreign policy did not create it.
Islam is foreign to us. It is completely and utterly repulsive as an ideology.
And the reason I happen to have Muslim friends, and have got on exceptionally well with Muslim colleagues, is that they were never hugely religious.
