There has been much pious talk in Britain about the need for inter-faith dialogue between Christians and Muslims but suddenly some in the Anglican Church seem less concerned with dialogue than with reasserting Britain’s status as an essentially Christian country.

In Oxford, controversy is brewing over the proposal that the new mosque under construction there be allowed to broadcast the call to prayer three times a day. Last week, the Reverend Charlie Cleverly, rector of St Aldates Church, Oxford, told listeners to BBC Radio that the call to prayer is very different from church bells, which he regards as a mere signal, and that for it to be broadcast across the surrounding neighborhood would be tantamount to imposing Islam on what is in the main a non-Muslim community. Brushing aside the objection that to most local residents its Arabic wording would be unintelligible, the vicar maintained that if the call to prayer were to be heard five times a day it would cause many to feel they were living in an alien environment, with the result that they would move away, in the process contributing to the creation of a Muslim ghetto.

In the same week, it transpired that the bishop of Rochester, the Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, was facing death threats following his extraordinary claim that Britain is witnessing the growth of Muslim “no-go areas”. Nazir-Ali was taken to mean that he believed there were more and more Muslim-dominated places which non-Muslims entered at their peril, though he has since maintained that he was actually referring to the danger of Britain becoming an increasingly segregated society, with different minorities leading parallel lives. The Pakistani-born bishop has become well known for his contention that the Church of England’s failure to set its face against multiculturalism and provide a national religious vision has nurtured Islamic extremism.

The Oxford Mosque controversy and the bishop’s embattled predicament are, so to say, heaven-sent stories for right-wing, xenophobic British newspapers like the Sun and the vastly influential, Daily Mail. They fuel the growing orthodoxy (of which the Mail is a pre-eminent proponent) that the British commitment to multiculturalism spawned by the liberal ethos of the 1960s was a mistake, encouraging minorities to pursue their own customs and values while making little effort to integrate into the wider British culture. The Daily Mail columnist Stephen Glover, a resident of Oxford, evidently believes that to permit the call to prayer to be broadcast three times a day would be to endorse this pernicious tendency. An abuse of British freedoms, it would also in Glover’s view be a betrayal of a city that boasts a Christian heritage.

The striking thing about the present debate is that it is affording certain Anglican clergymen an opportunity to step forward as popular leaders that they otherwise seldom enjoy nowadays. Britain is in many respects an increasingly secular culture, a post-Christian country where church going is in irreversible decline and where the views of Christian ministers no longer command much attention. When, however, they speak about the threat posed to Britain, or perhaps more specifically, to England and its traditions by Islam they are guaranteed a large and respectful hearing. There can be no doubt that the Reverend Cleverly’s suggestion that Islam threatens to violate the Englishness of Oxford resonates with large sections of white Britain.

It has, unfortunately, a special resonance for the far right British National Party, and for all his insistence that he welcomes British Muslims the rector, like the bishop of Rochester, is in danger of finding himself in the company of Britons who do not welcome them at all. Certainly, the websites of right-wing extremists have been quick to applaud the vicar’s protest over the call to prayer proposal.

The truth is that paranoia about Islamic terrorism has combined with a deepening national identity crisis to leave many Britons feeling that their country is being menaced by alien forces and that Muslims are the “enemy within”. Wittingly or not, Anglican clergymen like Cleverly and the bishop of Rochester are party to an orchestrated right-wing backlash against the Muslim community; the bishop’s denigration of multiculturalism may be said to be a coded way of attacking the very presence of Muslims in Britain. What needs underlining, however, is that this backlash has its roots in popular sentiment, in widespread fears that the English way of life is being undermined. If there is mounting pressure on minorities to fit it in, it is in no small measure because the indigenous British no longer feel confident of who they are.

That Britain is in the throes of headlong social change, with the issue of what its minorities are meant to be fitting into increasingly problematic is not addressed by the likes of the Reverend Cleverly. It is this evasiveness that prompts skepticism about their motives, arousing suspicions that their real message to Muslims is that they are welcome in Britain just so long as they make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Faced with much hostility, British Muslims have reason to feel that they are being subjected to systematic persecution — persecution which is part of the more general Western attack on the Islamic world led by US President George W. Bush. In many ways they are, and it is not hard to understand why some fear that they could yet suffer the sort of horrific victimization visited on the Muslims of Bosnia in the 1990s. All the same, it must be said that many Muslims are far too ready to attribute all their problems to some grand anti-Muslim Western conspiracy. If a handful of Muslims react to the bishop of Rochester’s remarks by issuing death threats against him, the law-abiding Muslim majority has no choice but to proclaim their horror at such threats and their determination to expose and bring to justice the zealots who make them. None of this is to make light of what often seem like calculated efforts to demonize Muslims on the part of purportedly well-meaning public figures. Thankfully, Britain’s Muslims are by no means bereft of prominent public allies among the white British establishment. The hierarchy of the Church of England has moved to distance itself from the remarks of the bishop of Rochester, while the bishop of Oxford, the Reverend John Pritchard, has offered a measured endorsement of the Oxford Mosque’s proposal to broadcast the call to prayer, exhorting Oxford’s residents to enjoy the town’s diversity.

When it comes to championing diversity, nobody in Britain has had a more honorable record than the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Livingstone, who faces an election in May, has missed no opportunity to reaffirm the case for a multicultural Britain where people are free to pursue their own cultural values provided that they do not interfere with the liberty and well being of others. His re-election would signal that Britain’s capital city is determined to demonstrate that, so far from being discredited, British multiculturalism remains a vibrant reality.