From the Guardian:
[Nigel Farage] described as “a wake up call and a warning to everybody” an event in Trafalgar Square earlier this week where hundreds of Muslims and people of other faiths prayed together, before the celebration of Eid.
He said the event, organised by the Ramadan Tent Project and attended by Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, was “an open, deliberate, wilful attempt, not at the private observance of a different religion, but the attempt to overtake, intimidate and dominate our way of life”.
The event has happened in the historic square in central London five times before without incident or previous controversy.
Farage has posted a clip of his speech online – he described participants as “a group of people headed up by the ghastly Sadiq Khan”, and denounced the previous Conservative government for having “let most of these people in”, ending with the promise that “we will not put up with this any more”. This was not, then, criticism of Islamic extremism or even of Islam: his target was Muslims as people, seen collectively as recent and unwelcome arrivals in the UK who therefore have less right to a public space that has historically been a focus for all sorts of cultural, political and religious events (such as a 2021 conspiracy theory rally).
It seems likely that Farage, as usual, was inspired by simple opportunism – his talking points were cribbed from a social media post made a couple of days beforehand by Nick Timothy, the Conservative Party shadow justice secretary. In Timothy’s view:
mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination.
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.
…I am not suggesting everybody at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook.
In other words, we don’t need to ask people why they participated – we know it was an “act of domination” (rather than, say, an expression of community spirit or religious witness) whether or not participants would recognise such a framing. There was no prima facie evidence of religious extremism, but ordinary Muslims who attended were being manipulated by “the Islamist playbook”, meaning that in terms of their presence in public spaces there is no real difference between a liturgical and traditional expression of faith and belligerent extremists waving obnoxious banners around. Timothy strikes the pose of a typical moral entrepreneur, identifying urgent social problem that most people appear to have overlooked for several years.
Timothy was countered by Dominic Grieve:
I agree that mass prayer in public by large groups without prior permission, that aims to disrupt the activities of others, can be an act of ‘domination’ just as a sit down on Westminster Bridge or the M25 can be or any other illegal demonstration or one accompanied by threats or harassment.
This did not apply to this gathering in Trafalgar Square. It was done with permission. It comprised short prayers followed by an Iftar to break the Ramadan fast. It threatened no one any more than the Palm Sunday procession (with permission) in which I shall participate shortly where I live and where there will be hymns to the effect that Jesus Christ is Lord. Your original post says that this event ‘should not happen again’. You are the Shadow Justice Secretary, perhaps one day the person who will take an oath to uphold the rule of law. As I put to you in my last post [here], stopping such an event would be unlawful and discriminatory unless you intend to advocate changing the law to discriminate against Muslims. Is that what you are saying? So far you have not attempted to answer this question.
A couple of recent examples of religious “domination” from central London come to mind: the Christian Right “King’s Army” march through Soho last October, and the month before that Brian Tamaki’s participation in Tommy Robinson’s misdescribed “free speech” rally, in which the New Zealand fundamentalist called for outright bans on non-Christian religious expression.
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