Muslim migration and racial violence

Muslims are now arriving in the West not only in Britain but also in the United States. Not impressed by what their own countries had to offer them, they saw great opportunities in the West - particularly in the countries where English is the official language. Recently the German ambassador in India urged the youth in that country to seriously consider moving to Germany but recognised that that would mean learning the German language. Most migrants to Britain and the United States don't face that problem. English is a major language in South Asia, the region from which most Muslim migrants have recently arrived. Today, I will examine how the Muslim population in Britain is faring.

There are approximately 4 million Muslim residents in Britain, making up 6 per cent of the country's population. The number increased from 1.6 million in 2001. The single largest group of Muslims in the United Kingdom are of Pakistani descent who were one of the first Muslim communities to permanently settle in the United Kingdom, arriving in England first in the late 1940s. Immigration from Mirpur, a city in the Pakistani part of Kashmir, grew from the late 1950s. These people had worked in the large dam built by a British company on the Jhelum River. They moved to England to work in the houses of the people who were contractors engaged in building the Mangla Dam.

London has the largest Muslim population. Most Muslims in the country belong to the Sunni sect of Islam. But a large number of the Ahmadiyya community also migrated to Britain. The Muslim population in Britain has grown significantly in recent years, at a rate several times faster than the population overall. Recent estimates suggest that around 5,000-6,000 people convert to Islam every year, majority being women. The first group of Muslims to go to Great Britain in significant numbers was in the 18th century. Most were sailors recruited from Bengal under then British rule. Later troubles in their homelands led to Muslim migration to Britain. The Arab Spring brought a wave of Muslim refugees to Britain. There was a large migration from Syria. Wars in what was once Yugoslavia brought Muslims from Kosovo to Britain.

Demographic changes are resulting in racial violence in the West - the United States and Western Europe. As human fertility declines - it has fallen below 2.1 children per woman - the size of the population declines and average age increases. Declining and older populations are not economically dynamic. Young people are needed to keep the economies robust and for this the West has turned to migration from countries in what is called the Global South. Those coming into the West are mostly people of colour and followers of faiths other than Christianity.

The result in several Western nations is the increase in Islamophobia. This is the case in Britain where the anti-immigrant nationalist Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, has been steadily moving from the fringes to mainstream politics. With eight members in Parliament, it consistently tops polls and is increasingly talked about winning the next general election, beating both the Conservative and Labour Parties. Farage used the killing of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student in Southampton, a city in southern England. His death was caused by a knife attack by a Sikh immigrant - in their religion, Sikhs are meant to carry kirpans, knives with large sharp blades.

The Nowak death stoked the British right. Farage reacted as follows: "Our leaders would like to see a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities" and urged Britons to respond with "pure, cold rage". A more explicitly far-right party, Restore Britain - formed by the lawmaker Rupert Lowe, a breakaway from Reform and endorsed by Trump, the American President - responded by saying in a long post on X, that "enough is enough" and that keeping alive the "savage" who killed Nowak served nobody. While this incident involved a British-born Sikh, most of the anger was aimed at migrants, focused on Muslims who have come into the country. As Daniel Trilling wrote in his book If We Tolerate This, flagrantly racist ideas and claims that would have been beyond the pale just over a decade ago now circulate among conservative newspapers and politicians as they struggle to keep up with the rage-bait of far-right influencers. In 2025, for instance, up-and-coming Conservative lawmaker Katie Lam told The Times that migrants, even if they were legal residents, needed to "go home", leaving Britain more "culturally coherent". As William Davies, the author of This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain, said, "The ascent of the far-right in Britain has been acquiring a feeling of inevitability, as if it can be delayed or slowed but never really reversed. Its opponents urgently need their own figureheads and movements if they are to demonstrate that they can do more than throw up their hands."

There was overt racism directed at the Muslim population in Britain. This took the form of "Paki bashing" predominantly from white power skinheads, the National Front and the British National Party throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Young Pakistani and Bangladeshi citizens of Britain mounted their movements to deal with racism.

Muslim migrants to Britain brought their religion with them. The Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, built in 1889, was the first purpose-built mosque in the country. In the same year a mosque in a terrace was built in Liverpool which became the Liverpool Muslim Institute. The first mosque in London was the Fazl Mosque built in 1924. British scholars made important contributions to the study of Islam and the impact of the religion on the West. A prominent British scholar translated the Quran into English. The decision by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to leave his office would create space for the parties that are hostile to all immigration, in particular that from the Muslim world.