Labour, Islamophobia, and the Silence of the Faithful

On 9 March the government published its new non-statutory definition of anti-Muslim hostility, alongside a £4 million programme and the appointment of Britain's first 'anti-Muslim hostility tsar'. It is modelled on the IHRA definition of antisemitism - the same framework, the same language, the same logic. Define the problem. Hire a tsar. Encourage adoption across sectors. Monitor. Review. Expand. It is not law, but it does not need to be. It is a tool designed to spread through institutions by soft pressure, and it will.

The definition itself is careful. It protects free speech on paper. You may criticise Islam. You may ridicule it. You may question its history and its practices. All of that is explicitly permitted. But the definition also covers 'prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims with the intention of encouraging hatred' - a phrase elastic enough to catch almost anything, depending on who is interpreting it and in what climate. Working definitions have a habit of hardening over time. The IHRA definition was non-statutory too. Ask any university how non-statutory it feels now.

None of this is surprising. It is what governments do. They cannot build cohesion, so they legislate against friction. They cannot inspire respect, so they define disrespect and create reporting mechanisms. The result is always the same: one community feels patronised, another feels silenced, and the distance between them grows. We have seen this before. The previous attempt at defining Islamophobia - put forward by a Parliamentary group - was also non-statutory. Lord Young of the Free Speech Union noted that it forced people to 'bite their tongues about the grooming gangs for fear of being branded Islamophobes'. That silence did not protect Muslims. It protected criminals. And it made every Muslim in Britain less safe by association. This new definition will follow the same path. Muslims who want genuine respect will not find it in a policy document. Britons who resent being told what they can and cannot say will push back harder. The cycle continues.

Let us be plain about what this definition is for. It is not there to protect a faith. Islam does not need a government definition to survive - it has outlasted every empire that ever tried to contain it. This definition exists to protect a political class that failed. Failed on immigration - by moving millions of people across the earth and expecting them to dissolve into someone else's culture. God made us into nations and tribes so that we may know one another - not so that we may be uprooted and thrown together without thought. Every people has a land, a tongue, and a way of life that was given to them. You cannot take a people from their soil, plant them in foreign ground, and expect no friction. That is not prejudice. That is nature. That is how God made the world.

The hostility that Muslims face in Britain is real, and it is a sin. But it is a sin born of political arrogance, not of the British people. For decades, politicians imported labour, ignored culture, and told both sides to get on with it. No shared faith. No shared story. No common ground beyond the economy. And when the inevitable resentment grew, they called it bigotry and wrote definitions to manage it. The definition is not protection. It is a plaster on a wound they made.

What makes our position unusual is this: as followers of Mahomet - as a people who honour him as a prophet of God alongside Moses and Jesus - this definition technically applies to us too. Hostility toward us for following the final prophet would fall squarely within its scope. We are, by any reading of this document, among the people it seeks to protect.

And we do not want it.

Not because the hostility is not real. It is. But a definition cannot heal what politicians broke. They moved peoples without giving them common ground - and now they offer paperwork instead. We reject the plaster. What this country needed was never a definition. It needed honesty - about what was done, who it was done to, and what comes next. The politicians will not provide that honesty because it would require them to admit that the project failed. So instead they write definitions and hire tsars. When a community prays daily, lives with integrity, serves its neighbours, and carries itself with dignity - it does not need a definition to shield it. It commands respect by how it lives, not by what the state writes on its behalf.

We follow Mahomet. We read his words alongside the words of Moses and Jesus, under one roof. We do not need the state to tell the nation that hostility toward us is wrong - because we receive none. We are of this land. We speak its tongue. We are its people. The hostility this definition seeks to address does not touch us, because we are not foreign to the country we live in. That is not a boast. It is the point. When faith is rooted in the soil it stands on, there is nothing to defend. That is the standard scripture sets. That is the standard we intend to keep.