Earlier this year, Trafalgar Square hosted what was billed as the largest public iftar in the world as Ramadan drew to a close. The event drew immediate criticism from Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy in surprisingly strong terms. Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, alongside other senior Reform figures, joined the outrage with their own similarly harsh repudiations. This led to an excruciating interview of Jenrick by Lewis Goodall, in which Jenrick was pushed into defending his position on the grounds of his supposedly staunch feminist commitments against gender-segregated spaces before being asked if he also opposed the Orthodox Jewish practice of separate prayer. Unsurprisingly, Jenrick attempted (unsuccessfully) to dodge the question. He should be thankful that Goodall did not have the wherewithal to follow up this punch by asking Jenrick about the necessity of defending women’s spaces against transgender men, which would have forced him to tie himself into further contradictions.
I happened to be at Trafalgar Square at the time, and as such I witnessed the event that has generated so much controversy. Far from an Islamist domination ritual, the event featured half an hour of short speeches punctuated by a campy daytime-television-presenter-type woman in a colourful headscarf, including a standard collection of platitudes from Sadiq Khan, followed by five minutes of (yes, gender-segregated) prayer before a free meal deal courtesy of Comptoir Libanais. A standard celebration of multiculturalism in twenty-first century London — perhaps not what we’d like to see hosted in the space surrounding Nelson’s Column, but nothing we wouldn’t expect, and certainly not a sign of some new and terrifying threat. Of course, the reality of the event (which only 3000 people attended) matters little compared to the hyperreal online presentation of it. It may well have been ‘the largest public iftar in the world’, but that is because such events are rather uncommon. Iftar (the daily breaking of fast during Ramadan) is usually a private affair, held with friends and family. How large would the largest public Christmas dinner have to be?
Whilst it is new for senior politicians to speak in such stark terms, concern over Islam in particular, separate from immigration qua immigration, has long been a staple of the British right going back to the foundation of the EDL by Tommy Robinson in 2009. The fundamental reason for this is quite simple: it is more comfortable to speak of fears about the changing character of the country in terms of religion, which is a set of ideas that an individual could plausibly choose to abandon, than in terms of ethnicity, which has a chilling, inescapable finality. Furthermore, Islam can be criticised in explicitly liberal terms over its teachings on intersex and interfaith relations, making it an even more acceptable target. It is understandable, then, that those seeking to oppose mass migration would be tempted to push the issue by focusing on Islam — but to do so would be a mistake.
