Nick Timothy is right: Islam is getting more assertive

Of all the attractions of central London, a mass Islamic call to prayer is not one you would find listed in most guidebooks. But that is nonetheless the spectacle that more than a few perplexed tourists would have found themselves witnessing on Monday night in Trafalgar Square. Beneath Nelson’s Column, in front of the National Gallery, a large crowd of Muslims knelt in pious observance. There, facing the St-Martin-in-the-Fields church, London mayor Sadiq Khan and a few hundred fellow Muslims performed a public adhan to mark the end of Ramadan.

Lots of people didn’t exactly appreciate the sight. One of them was Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary and Tory MP for West Suffolk. ‘Many people are too polite to say this’, Timothy wrote on X on Tuesday, ‘but mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination’. Expanding on his concerns, Timothy said:

‘The adhan – which declares there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger – is, when called in a public place, a declaration of domination. Perform these rituals in mosques if you wish. But they are not welcome in our public places and our shared institutions… I am not suggesting everyone at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight out of the Islamist playbook.’

Predictably, Timothy has been eviscerated for sharing his thoughts. In Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, PM Keir Starmer called on Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to sack Timothy. ‘The Tory party has got a problem with Muslims’, Starmer said, comments that have been repeated throughout Labour ranks. Badenoch resisted any suggestion that Timothy should be fired from the shadow ministry, saying he was ‘defending British values’.

Badenoch is right to stick up for him. London’s heart is Trafalgar Square, a place so teeming with people that it is difficult to walk through. Yet on Monday it fell completely silent, except for the melancholy wail of the Islamic call to prayer, echoing amid some of the capital’s best-known landmarks. There was something decidedly eerie about it – not helped by the gender segregation during prayer. Timothy was surely expressing the view of many Britons when he said that he was uncomfortable with such an event.

Timothy did not make his comments on the spur of the moment. They reflect a genuine concern with what can only be described as the growing influence, presence and assertiveness of Islam in British society. Only last weekend, a large crowd gathered in central London to celebrate Al-Quds Day, polluting the capital with anti-Semitic placards and posters showering praise on that most odious of Islamist butchers, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Other signs of Islam’s growing sway in British society might also have been on Timothy’s mind. Labour’s ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition, perhaps. Announced last week, it grants Islam a unique protected status not afforded to any other belief systems. Or perhaps he was thinking of the news, also last week, that schools in the north of England have been advised to restrict drawing, dancing and singing in order to placate Muslim pupils. Just a few weeks ago, the Gorton and Denton by-election was won by the Greens thanks to an overtly sectarian campaign, effectively pitting the constituency’s Muslim population against other voters. This is the context in which Timothy’s comments were made.

In modern Britain, it has become nearly impossible to criticise Islam without being told you are ‘Islamophobic’, or, in Starmer’s words, you have a ‘problem with Muslims’. The outraged response to Timothy’s post from all the usual sources is, in itself, proof of this. The adhan might not have been an act of ‘domination’, as Timothy had it, but it wasn’t exactly an olive branch, either.

It is high time we lifted this veil of censorship. No religion should be allowed to exist above criticism or condemnation.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.