At a time when mosques in Britain are reportedly attacked, vandalised, or physically damaged every few days, the question of mosque safety is no longer peripheral. It sits at the centre of British Muslim life, shaping how people worship, travel, organise, and imagine their place in society. This essay reflects on the National Emergency Conference on UK Mosque Safety and Security held in Birmingham yesterday, drawing on the conference discussions, my own contribution from the PROTONE project, and the wider political and social context in which British Muslim communities now operate. It argues that mosque security cannot be reduced to cameras, shutters, or guards alone. It must also involve trust, relationships, local resilience, inclusive leadership, and a serious reckoning with the structural and cultural Islamophobia that makes such protection necessary in the first place.
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We live in difficult and revealing times, not least in relation to the protection of places of worship, and especially mosques. Recent reports suggest that mosques are being attacked, vandalised, or physically damaged with alarming regularity. This is a stark reminder of the tremendous challenges facing British Muslims today: the challenge of worshipping safely, sustaining community life, and navigating a public climate in which Islam and Muslims are too often framed as problems to be managed rather than citizens to be protected.
I had the important opportunity to attend the National Emergency Conference on Mosque Safety and Security, convened by Faith Associates and attended by 25 national mosque associations. The conference focused on the acute challenges mosques face and what can be done about them, particularly in relation to government policy, community empowerment, organisational development, and resilience. These concerns are not abstract. Many Muslim communities live with a persistent sense of fear, intensified by social media, political rhetoric, and a 24-hour media cycle that repeatedly presents Muslims as suspicious, alien, or threatening. For many worshippers, even the ordinary journey to the mosque for prayer, reflection, solace, or study now involves negotiating anxieties about personal safety. Once inside, there can still be the fear that something might happen. When incidents occur, attendance falls, volunteers retreat, and already stretched mosque resources come under further pressure. Yet the response is complicated by the wider securitisation agenda itself, which can make mosques wary of state intervention even when protection is urgently needed.
British Muslims therefore face acute challenges on two fronts at once. On one side is the everyday reality of anti-Muslim hostility and the structural, cultural, and arguably institutional Islamophobia that shapes daily life. On the other is the pressure placed on mosques by policy frameworks associated with counter-extremism, surveillance, and security regulation. Mosques are expected to empower, develop, and sustain their communities while also operating under the watchful eye of the state, where mistakes in governance, finance, teaching, or public messaging can be interpreted through a security lens. This is especially troubling because the overwhelming majority of mosques have no connection whatsoever to extremism or violence. Across more than 2,000 mosques in Britain, only a handful of cases over several decades have been politically overinterpreted through association with individuals who later became linked to terrorism. Such exceptional cases should not define everyday Muslim institutional life.
This wider context framed my own contribution to the conference. I spoke about findings from the PROTONE project, for which I led the research as part of a consortium coordinated by the International Dialogue Platform in Brussels. Working across Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Germany, my team and I surveyed more than 3,600 people and interviewed nearly 60 rabbis, priests, and imams about protective security. Although the study was conducted in mainland Europe, its implications for the UK are significant. Our findings show that threats to places of worship are neither imagined nor merely perceived. They are real, sinister, and deeply impactful. The rise in attacks against mosques reflects what I described as a politics of violence: a chain that begins with words, moves through political commentary and social media distortion, and sometimes ends in physical attack. When politicians and commentators repeatedly depict Muslims as a problem, an invasion, or a culture that does not belong, a hostile climate is created. Falsehoods travel quickly, as seen in the aftermath of Southport, where misinformation about a Muslim attacker fuelled anger. When individuals hear repeatedly that Muslims are the enemy, some choose to act on it. This means we are not dealing only with isolated criminals, but with a wider climate of intimidation designed to make Muslims shrink their lives, hide their faith, keep their children at home, and think twice before attending prayers.
The first major finding from the project was that the strongest driver of feeling unsafe was not fear of terrorism in the abstract, but direct experience of violence and damage to buildings. When one mosque is attacked, worshippers in mosques many miles away also feel targeted, because an attack on a place of worship is rightly understood as an attack on everyone who prays there. This is why incidents in one town are felt in Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, and beyond. Fear travels in ways statistics cannot fully capture. In response, communities need calm, visible, and organised action. Such action restores confidence more effectively than any press release.
The second finding was counterintuitive. Communities that invest only in physical security—fences, shutters, cameras, and guards—do not necessarily feel safer. In some cases, heavy visible security makes worshippers more anxious because every barrier becomes a daily reminder of threat. A mosque that looks like a fortress can stop feeling like a home, especially for older people, children, new attendees, or neighbours approaching for the first time. This does not mean that physical protection is unimportant. Sensible security matters. But it works best when it is discreet, proportionate, and embedded within something larger: relationships.
Across the countries we studied, the communities that felt most secure were not those with the highest walls, but those with the deepest roots. They knew their neighbours, and their neighbours knew them. They had named contacts in the local police before anything happened, not only afterwards. They had relationships with councils, schools, churches, community groups, and local media. When something did happen, those communities were not alone. Neighbours came forward in support, police responses were faster and better informed, and local media told the story with sympathy rather than suspicion. Isolation, by contrast, is a vulnerability. A mosque that nobody outside the community knows is also a mosque that nobody outside the community will defend. I therefore asked the audience: if your mosque were attacked tomorrow, how many non-Muslim neighbours would stand with you the next morning? If the honest answer is “not many”, that is a security gap, and it can be closed without spending a penny on hardware.
We also found that congregations with a simple plan felt safer than those with only anxiety. Such a plan need not be elaborate. It can answer basic questions: who locks which door, who calls the police, who looks after the children, who speaks to the media, and who checks on the vulnerable? Fear thrives on helplessness, on the feeling that something terrible may happen and there is nothing anyone can do. A plan replaces helplessness with roles and gives people back a sense of control. That psychological shift is itself a form of protection. I also emphasised the importance of reporting incidents, supporting children who overhear anxious conversations, checking on elders who stop attending, and standing with any mosque attacked anywhere in Britain through phone calls, visits, delegations, and Friday prayers. This was the essence of my message from the study, which my colleagues and I are now developing into a book, Faith Under Siege, to be published by Routledge next year.
The conference also heard from senior, experienced, and highly articulate imams and mosque leaders, who repeated many of the same concerns. The effects of insecurity are wide-ranging. They affect young people, schooling, women’s mobility, volunteer capacity, organisational behaviour, and the everyday running of mosques. They also shape leadership dynamics in institutions that are often already under pressure. A particularly difficult example concerned the recent case of Ijtima in Ipswich, where thousands of people reportedly had to be evacuated on the final morning of an Islamic festival held every 20 years. Although details remain limited, arrests were made, and close cooperation between counterterrorism policing and event leadership appears to have prevented a potentially catastrophic attack. The case was reported in the media, but, as often happens, it quickly disappeared from the public agenda.
This led many in the room to speak of double standards. There was no COBRA meeting, no ministerial walkabout, no sustained political response, and no obvious escalation in the national protection of Muslim places of worship. For many participants, this absence confirmed a long-standing concern: mosque safety has been discussed for generations, yet Muslim communities still do not receive the consistent support they need. The underlying problem is not new, but the current climate feels more hostile, and the response more unequal. This produces distrust, especially because the state has itself maintained forms of suspicion towards Muslim communities since 9/11 and 7/7. Securitisation, surveillance, and counterterrorism continue to dominate policy and practice more strongly than community development, empowerment, resilience, and capacity building.
In the afternoon workshops, significant concerns were raised about media framing, political discourse, everyday fear, and the particular vulnerability of visibly Muslim women, who are often attacked and are among the least likely to report such incidents. Yet I also sensed tremendous resilience and determination. Many participants spoke about interfaith relations, intercultural activity, and the importance of building strong local foundations with neighbours, local authorities, police, schools, churches, and relevant government departments. At the same time, there was a deep psychological malaise. In situations of stress and anxiety, people often respond through fight, flight, or freeze. I sensed a great deal of freeze. Fighting is not the answer, withdrawal is not desirable, and yet many communities feel stuck between fear and a state that too often securitises rather than supports. The challenge is therefore to move from paralysis to purposeful local organisation.
In my view, mosques reflect their localities and geographies, and their strength must be built from the ground up. Mosque leadership and organisational capacity should focus on what matters most: young people, women, interfaith and intercultural engagement, local trust, and strong relationships. Looking to the state alone to rescue the situation leads to a brick wall. Governments may make short-term promises, but longer-term protection depends on local organisation, rooted identities, credible networks, and bottom-up development. This does not remove the need for national political engagement. Many participants discussed the idea of a National Council of Mosques that could bring different umbrella organisations together, provide a sustained voice, and support the fair distribution, allocation, and evaluation of protective security funding. Concerns were also raised about the effectiveness of funding models developed without meaningful Muslim consultation or without sufficient experience of mosque security. Muslim voices must actively shape policy development, funding allocation, and delivery so that local volunteers gain the skills, experience, and confidence to sustain protection into the future.
There are many fronts on which this work must proceed. Young people constitute a large proportion of British Muslims, with roughly one in two under the age of 25 and one in three under the age of 15. Yet mosque leadership is often composed of older congregational members whose priorities may focus on providing more space for worship, while young people often seek activities that speak to their needs, identities, and aspirations. This remains a perennial problem. I remember similar conversations in 2006, when the same questions and the same solutions were being raised. Concerns were also expressed about women’s participation in leadership. It is not enough simply to encourage women to take part; opportunities must be made real. Cultural patriarchy, masculine organisational behaviour, and informal exclusion can still be intimidating, even though many mosques do excellent work and should not be overshadowed by the failures of a few. The Home Office and other state actors also need to recognise these realities and work in ways that empower, develop, support, and protect communities rather than merely securitising them.
The next steps are urgent. British Muslims now constitute around 6.7 per cent of the population, numbering approximately four million people, and this population will continue to grow. This brings demographic, social, cultural, political, and economic challenges, but also major opportunities. This is not a victimhood framework or a deficit agenda. It is also essential to recognise the tremendous value, contribution, and impact of Muslims in Britain: economically, politically, culturally, scientifically, educationally, and civically. Organisations such as Equi continue to document these contributions, which are often ignored, undercounted, or rendered invisible. This balance is central to understanding British Muslim relations with the state and society today. On one side are the real dynamics of exclusion, disadvantage, marginalisation, alienation, Islamophobia, and securitisation. On the other are the equally real contributions, resilience, values, and civic commitments of British Muslim communities.
The task ahead is therefore both practical and moral. Mosques need protection, but they also need trust. They need funding, but also fair consultation. They need physical security, but also relationships, inclusive leadership, and rooted local confidence. Above all, British Muslim communities should remain true to their teachings and values while continuing to build alliances with the wider society around them. Most people are open to meaningful conversation, and minds can shift when relationships are built. The challenge is to recognise both the urgent threats facing Muslims and the inevitable strength of British Muslim life itself: its contribution, resilience, and capacity to shape a more secure, inclusive, and confident future.