Britain is at a hinge moment

Last week, two teenagers walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego and shot three Muslim men dead. They were a security guard, a teacher, and a 78-year-old caretaker. Their manifesto, titled “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant,” was built around that of the Christchurch attacker as a template. The ecosystem that produced them is transatlantic, and Britain is now well inside it.

On March 22, 2017, I was in Parliament overlooking Westminster Bridge when Khalid Masood drove a car onto the pavement, stabbed a police officer to death at the gates, and was shot. By the time the building came out of lockdown, I had launched a crowdfunding appeal for the victims’ families. Within days it had raised more than £50,000. It was what any decent Londoner would do.

In modern British discourse, “Muslim Brotherhood” has ceased to function as a precise analytical term. It is now deployed as a loose instrument of suspicion against any visible, civically engaged Muslim, regardless of belief, record, or affiliation. I am a recurring case study.

In 2015, Andrew Gilligan’s Sunday Telegraph put me on its front page as one of Britain’s “Islamic ‘radicals’ at the heart of Whitehall.” My offense was sitting on a cross-government working group set up to combat anti-Muslim hatred. The article coined the term “entryism” for British Muslims who engage in democratic life. The government of the day defended me publicly. I was not removed. I continued as an independent adviser to the UK government until I chose to leave, on my own terms.

A decade later, a long-form online investigation took the same approach: a photograph of me hosting an iftar for the man who is now prime minister, his deputy, and the woman who is now home secretary; donations, declared and lawful, described as “largesse”; and the transatlantic network of Western Muslim leaders I founded described as maintaining “controversial alliances.” The venue had changed. The method had not. My work with the government continued, and serious commentators dismissed the piece. But whether any one smear lands is beside the point.

I am a British citizen, born and raised in inner-city East London, who has spent 2 decades building bridges

The point is the public file they build, not the facts. Their smears are unfalsifiable by design. Deny them, and the denial is a show of sophistication; point to your record, and the record is simply cover. What matters is the body of smears that grows with every article.

I am not, and have never been, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. I am a British citizen, born and raised in inner-city East London, who has spent two decades building bridges between communities.

My opposition to political Islam is conviction, not convenience. I do not believe religion belongs in the machinery of the state, or that the politicization of faith does any good for the countries it touches. Hamas does not speak for the Palestinian people, whose cause I support without reservation: a sovereign state, an end to occupation, and an end to the catastrophe in Gaza that Western policy continues to enable. The  Muslim Brotherhood’s brief and disastrous time in power in Egypt offers no model worth defending.

And most British Muslims agree with me; the polling data is clear. An Opinium poll commissioned by the Concordia Forum last year found that 85 percent of British Muslims support democracy as the best system of government, compared with 71 percent of the general public. Seven in 10 say they feel completely or mostly loyal to Britain. This figure reaches only half of the wider British public. The caricature and the data now live in entirely separate universes.

And yet, three weeks ago, Reform UK swept to more than 1,400 council seats and took control of 14 councils. This is a party whose leader has called British Muslims a “fifth column,” described public Eid prayers in Trafalgar Square as an attempt to “overtake, intimidate and dominate our way of life,” and claimed, without evidence, that 46 percent of British Muslims support Hamas. Newly elected Reform councilors have already been exposed for sharing material referring to Muslims as “scum.” Millions of British Muslims now live, for the first time, under councils led by a party whose leader has publicly identified them, by religion, as a threat.

This is the political climate in which we are now expected to go about our lives. The price is borne at school gates and in inboxes, in conversations I have had with my family about why a stranger online has decided their father is a danger to the country he was born in, and in the quiet decision so many talented young British Muslims are now making to step away from public life rather than become the next target.

The asymmetry is striking. No other community in Britain is expected to repeatedly prove the negative: that it does not secretly belong to a foreign ideological project. Conspiracy theories targeting the Jewish community are rightly named and rejected by mainstream politics; the same intellectual hygiene should apply here. We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for ordinary treatment.

A serious democracy can hold two things at once. It can confront actual extremism, work British Muslims are already doing in mosques, schools, and counter-radicalization programs, while also preventing that work from being hijacked by a political ecosystem that has decided suspicion is cheaper than evidence.

Britain is at a hinge moment. Reform’s surge is not weather but structure, and the next three years will decide what kind of country sits on the other side of it. Will the mainstream draw a line, the way it would for any other community subjected to such widespread conspiratorial framing? Or will the smear industry continue to set the terms?

I am not waiting for permission to belong here. Neither is anyone else I know. We have not replaced anyone. We have joined. We staff the NHS, run the businesses, fill the classrooms, host the iftars, and raise the next generation of citizens. British Muslims celebrate this country alongside Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Hindu fellow citizens, joining in Christmas, Diwali, Vaisakhi, and Hanukkah celebrations just as our neighbors join us for Eid and iftars. We ask only to be treated by the same standard of equal belonging and mutual respect. We believe in this country, on the evidence of every credible poll, more than the average voter does.

That is not a threat to Britain; it is Britain.

• Muddassar Ahmed is president of the Concordia Forum and managing partner of Unitas Communications.