For Liverpool’s largest mosque, this week has been the first time most entrances are blocked, people in reflective jackets take turns patrolling, and a handful of worshippers sleep inside at night, according to Reuters.
Officials at the Al-Rahma Mosque say these are all necessary precautions during the worst riots in the UK in years.
The heightened vigil has come as some Muslims and ethnic minorities in Liverpool claim they feel unsafe amid widespread protests targeting mosques, immigration centres, and hotels where asylum seekers have allegedly been living.
Both mosque officials and other Muslims in Liverpool revealed they were shocked after two mosques further north in England were attacked by violent crowds, with hundreds of anti-immigration protesters and counter-protesters clashing in Liverpool city centre. Shops were looted and several police officers suffered injuries.
A second mosque in Liverpool, the Abdullah Quilliam, which describes itself as Britain’s first, has been temporarily closed due to violence fuelled by a false claim circulating online that the killer of three girls in neighbouring Southport was an Islamist migrant. Abdulwase Sufian, a 20-year-old student who helps at the Al-Rahma, said:
I was born here, I was raised here. So seeing this, it just doesn’t feel like home. Seeing what’s happened, it’s gotten me scared, not just for myself, but for the future.
Sufian added that the separate women’s entrance to the mosque, which served a wide range of Muslims from ethnic Yemenis to Pakistanis, had been closed to discourage women from entering the mosque in the evenings for security reasons. He himself did not go outside his immediate neighbourhood for fear of his safety.
Muslims are terrified
Saba Ahmed, a community worker and another Liverpudlian Muslim, said she had felt “terrified” in recent days. Nevertheless, many of Ahmed’s white English friends supported her, with some neighbours offering to go grocery shopping so she could stay safe at home.
That’s our people in Liverpool, that’s our fellow neighbours here.
Others, however, were less fortunate. Farmanullah Nasiri, a taxi driver, revealed he was attacked after picking up two passengers on Aigburth Road in Liverpool in the early hours of Tuesday morning. One of them, a woman, punched him in the face and smashed his video recorder as she got out of his silver Ford Focus after an argument over the fare had begun. She insulted him when she found out he was an ethnic Afghan, Nasiri said.
This is kind of a racism … Been here for more than 10 years in Liverpool. Everybody’s friendly. There’s no issue like this before. This is the first time.
Tell MAMA, a group that tracks anti-Muslim incidents, has received more than 500 calls and online reports of anti-Muslim behaviour from across the UK in the last week. This was five times more than the previous week, its director Iman Atta reported.
The group argues that anti-Muslim hatred had been growing in Britain even before the riots began, and especially since the conflict in Gaza started last year. More than a quarter of the 550 British Muslims surveyed last month said they had experienced an anti-Muslim hate incident in the past year.
Stay calm
Amid all the tension, Muslim community leaders are advising calm, while many young people in the community may feel tempted to react.
Footage from Sky News earlier this week showed a large group of mainly Asian men carrying Palestinian flags gathered in the Birmingham area after rumours of a nationalist protest at the site. Police reported that a man was attacked and a pub window smashed, with one man charged with possession of an offensive weapon.
Both white and non-white people calling themselves anti-racist, anti-fascist, or pro-Palestinian have taken part in competing counter-protests. Sometimes extreme left-wing anarchists have also participated. However, community leaders disapproved of such gatherings, Sajjad Amin, trustee of the UKIM Khizra Mosque in Manchester, 30 miles (50 kilometres) from Liverpool, said.
We don’t want these counter protests or these large groups of young people turning up because that’s the spark that we don’t need … so we need to be very careful.
Everyone is scared
Adam Kelwick, an imam at the temporarily-closed Abdullah Quilliam mosque, stated that it “prepared for the worst” when anti-immigration demonstrators had gathered outside last week. However, the protesters calmed down after offers of food and dialogue.
All it took was a few burgers and some chips and some genuine intention from our side.
As of 2021, the Muslim population in England and Wales was 3.9 million, or 6.5 per cent of the total. Yet heightened tensions are stressing out this community as well as others.
Local resident Santhosh Thomas, an ethnic Indian, helped chain two large metal road signs to the fence of a nearby church to prevent them being used as weapons. He stated that his dark skin made him a target of protesters regardless of his religion.
It’s not just Muslims … everyone is scared.
