How Jews and Christians came to Muslims' defence

What an open iftar revealed about Britain’s changing language on faith - and the solidarity now emerging in response

Larry’s Bar, under the National Portrait Gallery, is London’s best-kept secret. I was on my way there with a friend last week when we heard the Muslim call to prayer. “What on earth is that?” she asked. The answer: an open iftar, where non-Muslims are invited to join Muslims for a meal to mark the end of Ramadan. It’s intended as a cohesive national event. They’ve done it at Lord’s, Windsor Castle, Shakespeare’s Globe, Cambridge. Jews, Christians and atheists all attend. But to someone passing by at that exact moment, seeing all these people praying, it would look like Muslims taking over Trafalgar Square.

It was Nick Timothy, a Tory MP, who beat Reform to the punch by saying the prayer - provocatively next to a church, he said - was an “act of domination”. A row followed. But I didn’t hear anyone make the fundamental point: this was an event open to all, where Muslims invite their non-Muslim neighbours to demystify the occasion, join the iftar (meal) and in so doing extend a hand of friendship. That hand was being cynically portrayed as the fist of the would-be dominator.

Growing up in the Highlands, I once celebrated Passover with Jews. At the military base where I lived in Cyprus, Catholics shared a church service with Protestants. We’d separate for communion, but the rest of the service was the same. It showed each half of the congregation how alike we are. Such occasions are rare and powerful: gestures of cohabitation, of neighbourliness, of friendship. My own church opens up with ‘Catholicism for the Curious’ classes, various ‘invitational’ events, soup kitchens and more. The idea is not to hide away but to actively serve the wider community - and in so doing, create the architecture for a pluralistic, multi-faith society.

The hard right has recently started to take up the cross - and us it as a cudgel. Snarl at Islam and say they are simply ‘defending our way of life’. Framing faith as conflict. Tommy Robinson has converted and held a carol concert protest with a group of nutty preachers (one of whom told the crowds that he used to be a witch). I recognised a flag waved at the Robinson event outside parliament last week: the Cross of St George, with a crucifix superimposed. You’d struggle to find a hard-right commentator who has not converted recently. The old racial politics is now giving way to a ‘civilisational battle’ narrative.

So we see Christianity being enlisted in politics to advance a new narrative: that Western way of life is under attack by both the woke left and the Muslims. This is how you build new political movements: sell victim vs oppressor narratives. For those on the right peddling identity politics, the crucifix is now the must-have political accessory.

Robert Jenrick barely said a word about religion in most of his parliamentary career but now pops up to demand that Keir Starmer celebrates what he calls “Psalm Sunday”. He means Palm Sunday, and the fact that he can get the two confused shows the level of cynicism here. Faith is a new tool he has picked up only recently. And yes, Christians can point to the aspect of Islamic worship we find jarring: the gender segregation during prayer. How regressive, we say. But where do you stop with this critique? What about the mechitza, the curtain separating men from women in Orthodox Jewish synagogues? Or the Catholic church’s refusal to ordain women or marry gay couples?

If we are to rub along together in these islands - Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, Humanists, Atheists, Anglicans, Evangelicals - we have to recognise what Jonathan Sacks, the former chief Rabbi, described as the “dignity of difference”. That is: to live, and let live.

The Jewish defence

Jews know better than anyone what happens when the ‘dignity of difference’ approach is replaced by the ‘this is a Christian country’ logic now being seeded into the UK public debate. Tribal hatred is a glitch hardcoded into human nature, there to be activated in times of economic distress. A nation-under-threat narrative can be easily promoted, to recruit supporters to your cause. New digital techniques mean such psychological manipulation, promoting in-groups vs out-groups divides, can happen via algorithm.

Stephan Zweig’s World of Yesterday describes what it feels like to live through such a vibe shift. How cultured, cohabiting Europe descended into sectarian chaos; how his own friends started suddenly seeing their world through the newly-made prism of sectarian (that is, anti-Jewish) conflict. And this madness was enabled, most of all, by to those who didn’t resist or speak out when the (Nazi) crazies emerged, thinking they were a lesser evil than the other (Communist) crazies. No one spoke out for sane. Civilised Europe was torn apart for want of people to defend its values.

To be Jewish is to understand this mechanism: the cynical cultivation of moral panic, followed by pogrom. In our own way, Catholics - at least those of us who have lived through sectarianism and been cast as an enemy within - recognise it too. As the famous poem goes: first, they came for the Communists…

So it is perhaps no surprise that the Jewish News was the first to defend the open iftar in a thundering editorial. It doesn’t take much to imagine what happens when the ‘this is a Christian country’ brigade get their boots on.

“There are times when Jews in this country wish to openly and publicly display our faith, whether that is through dozens of public Menorah lightings around the country, Purim parades through neighbourhoods with large numbers of Jews, road closures for a Hachnasat Sefer Torah, visiting streams or lakes on Rosh Hashana for Tashlich or large throngs of Charedim protesting education bills outside Westminster while reading Psalms and then davening Minchah. We are fortunate to live in a liberal, democratic society where such things are open to us - for many centuries such things would have been unthinkable.

Are there Islamists in this country who wish to assert their way of life over others? Of course. But it is hard to think of a more counterproductive way of combating such a thought process than by telling the many moderate Muslims that they - and they alone - should be unable to celebrate their faith in a public venue which they have booked for an event. In fact, there are few things more likely to help Islamists in their portrayal of British society as irretrievably hostile towards Muslims.

There are those in our community who will respond to this by telling us that the situation with Muslims is ‘different’. To that we would encourage them to look across the Atlantic. A number of the most influential right-wing voices in the United States were railing against Muslims a few years ago. Now they have switched their sights to target Jews.

Not angles, but angels

And then Christian bishops rallied to the defence. Here is the Anglican Bishop of Willesden:

The public iftar in Trafalgar Square was not an act of cultural imposition, nor a signal of division. It was, rather, a moment of hospitality: an invitation to share in the breaking of the fast during Ramadan, extended by one community to the wider public. It was open, generous and peaceful. It reflected something profoundly British - the instinct to gather, to mark significant moments together, and to make space in our common life for the traditions that shape our neighbours.

To suggest that such an event is somehow threatening risks misunderstanding both the nature of religious expression and the character of our national life. Religious freedom in this country has never meant the privatisation of belief. It has meant the opposite: the right of individuals and communities to live out their faith openly, visibly and without fear. That principle applies as much to Muslims observing Ramadan as it does to Christians celebrating Easter, Jews marking Passover, Hindus celebrating Diwali, or Sikhs observing Vaisakhi.

We also had the Anglican Bishop of Kirkstall on BBC Newsnight

The British model

Rounding on Muslims is not new, but this multi-faith defence of Muslims is. What you might call civilisationalism - a theme beloved of MAGA and Elon Musk - is a new creed, and like Brexit it divides old tribes. I’m not neutral. I loathe identity politics and religious sectarianism - in either its jihadist or its religious-nationalist form. The rival model is not multiculturalism, because we’re talking about a British culture of tolerance and mutual respect that has naturally evolved without a manifesto or political architect. The best word for it is Britishness. Our model that’s precious, but fragile. From Rwanda to Lebanon to the former Yugoslavia, we’ve seen how generations of cohabitation can descend into tribalist, sectarian chaos. One set of rabble-rousers begets another, and all they need to succeed is for those in the middle to say nothing and hope it goes away. If our British model is attacked, by jihadists or nativists, it needs defending. But the language of attack is new. What’s the language of defence?

I used to work as a barman in Cleo’s in Rosyth, for dockyard workers. The rule was no talk about football or religion, lest fights break out. The fights then would have been about Catholic vs Protestant - sectarianism that, in some cases, led to knife attacks and murder. It has now almost vanished. Those of us who welcome its demise should be alarmed at attempts to revive it now, with Muslims as the new target.

This was the Jewish News’s point. Those going after the Muslims now would come after the Jews next - and in some quarters, they are already doing so. The Muslims at the Open Iftar wanted to break bread with Jews and Christians. So do other faith leaders stay quiet when Muslims then are slated by the online right as a result? Or might it be time to show some solidarity?

I write this as a member of a religious minority, so I declare my vested interest. When I started journalism I was advised “no good can ever come of anyone knowing you’re Catholic.” I took that advice. When I recently told a friend in Westminster how I was beaten for being Catholic (hardly an unique experience in 1980s central Scotland), how others were knifed and sometimes killed, she was astonished. “You should write about this,” she said: as if sectarianism is a revelation. It made me wonder how many SW1 types playing this new game of religious identity politics are genuinely ignorant of where this path has always led.

The King’s gambit: Britishness as a remedy to sectarianism

We can be clear-eyed about egregious integration failings, but without falling into the trap of tainting a whole community with the actions of the nutters. Jonathan Sacks’s proposal is a British national identity “so strong that it brings different ethnic and religious communities together in pursuit of the common good: not just the good for “my” group, but the good for all of us together. A nation should respect its faiths, and faiths should respect the nation.”

There are all too many examples of segregated,, closed communities, making no effort to reach out, no effort to respect the nation. The Muslims in Trafalgar Square were explicitly reaching out. Gathering in homage to both their faith and their country.

It sometimes feels as if Muslims can never catch a break - portrayed as dominating even when they invite outsiders as guests. That’s a depressing trend. But seeing Jews and Christians rally to their defence this week is a more hopeful one. There was, to me, something profoundly British in that response. And here, the King is more than just a national figurehead. In his first speech after his coronation, he said he had a duty as sovereign:-

“…to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for Faith itself and its practise through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals. This diversity is not just enshrined in the laws of our country; it is enjoined by my own faith. As a member of the Church of England, my Christian beliefs have love at their very heart. By my most profound convictions, therefore – as well as by my position as Sovereign – I hold myself bound to respect those who follow other spiritual paths, as well as those who seek to live their lives in accordance with secular ideals.”

That is the standard. A country that protects “the space for Faith itself and its practice” cannot then recoil when that faith is visible in the public square. The open iftar was not a challenge to Britain, but a test of it. And the answer came quickly: Jews and Christians defending it, because in doing so they were defending their own freedoms - and the country that makes them possible.