A report by race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust explores the way Islamophobia is growing and highlights its structural nature across British society.
The report, Islamophobia: the intensification of racism against Muslim communities in the UK, reveals the summer’s racist riots emerged from escalating anti-Muslim sentiment across Britain. The study draws direct connections between the violence and the portrayal of Muslim communities protesting the Gaza genocide.
Backed by Lady Warsi, Amnesty International UK and the Muslim Council for Britain, the report highlights how rhetoric portraying Muslims as a threat to British society has become increasingly explicit. Such narratives have deliberately painted British Muslims as outsiders with questionable loyalties.
“As a Muslim woman, who has spent my entire adult life in the shadows of post 9/11 securitisation of Muslim communities, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that in this last year, there has been a significant step-change in the way that Islamophobia has become the normalised currency of political conversation,” said Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust.
“The sense that Muslim communities are a threat to Britain no longer lurks euphemistically in coded conversations, but has become overt and direct.
“Whether it is politicians speaking from the benches in parliament, or mainstream headlines screaming about ‘Islamist extremists’, Islamophobia has reached fever pitch in the UK and it is time that we put a rational conversation back on the agenda; these are not claims for victimhood status but for action that affirms an anti-racist understanding of the structural and political nature of Islamophobia, and the need for government action to eradicate it.”
Intensifying patterns of Islamophobia
The report maps the intensifying patterns of Islamophobia across British society. It examines anti-Muslim prejudice in areas, including the 2024 election campaign, higher education, criminal justice, policing and Prevent, and mental healthcare.
It highlights secondary data which shows that:
- One in three Muslim students experience Islamophobic abuse.
- Muslims are more likely to reside in the most-deprived fifth of local authority districts, with almost half a million more Muslims now living in these most-deprived locales than in 2011.
- In the NHS Muslims are referred to Prevent eight times more often than non-Muslims.
- Muslims now make up 18% of the prison population, despite making up only 6% of the general population.
“For far too long, Muslims have been misrepresented and mistrusted, and the government’s disengagement with Muslim civil society only serves to intensify the isolation of British Muslims,”said Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.
“It is no longer possible to simply hope that this hostile climate will improve, we need committed action to counter Islamophobia and to deal with the resurgence of far right racism in Britain. That means ending the policy of disengagement, adopting a formal definition of Islamophobia and dealing with its various manifestations as described in this report.”
Zara Mohammed, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council for Britain, said: “We see how these issues have been exacerbated by the threat of far-right extremism, as evidenced by the terrifying riots targeting Muslims and mosques, fulled in part by misinformation campaigns further perpetuating Islamophobia. We also see these challenges when advocating for Palestinian rights, with narratives that continue to demonise Muslims by conflating pro-Palestinian advocacy with support for terrorism.
“There must be a robust strategy to tackle the deeply institutional and insidious nature of Islamophobia. We need to move beyond the prevailing framework of securitisation and misleading narratives around integration. I commend the Runnymede Trust for providing this critical insight and urging the need for meaningful action.”
