IN MY LAST article, I spoke about Britain’s Prevent policy, sold to the public as a shield against terrorism. But it didn’t shield anyone. Instead, it scarred thousands of Muslims, poisoned trust between neighbours, and cast suspicion over an entire community. Prevent claimed to protect us. In reality, it controlled us.
I don’t say this as someone observing from afar. I say it as someone who has lived under its shadow for 20 long years. As a Muslim active in the community, a khateeb, a parent, and a healthcare professional, I’ve seen how Prevent seeped into our mosques, our institutions, our children’s schools and universities, even our private conversations. It reshaped the air we breathe.
What was introduced as a policy to stop violence inevitably mutated into something far more intrusive: policing “extremism.” Everyone understands what violence is. But extremism? That word was deliberately left vague, elastic enough for the government to stretch it over any idea it found uncomfortable.
And before we knew it, ordinary Islamic beliefs were being deemed extreme: khilafah, shariah, holding that homosexuality is sinful, supporting Palestine.
Suddenly, beliefs that had been part of the Muslim intellectual tradition and jurisprudence since our Messenger ﷺ walked the earth, were treated not as ideas, but as threats.
This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. As the Arab Spring shook the Muslim world awake, people were rising, defying tyrants, demanding dignity and justice and looking for an alternative. The old order panicked.
In the Muslim world, those remaining regimes like the UAE and Saudi rushed to crush any Islamic political vision such as when they worked against Morsi in Egypt.
In the West, the battleground was different. The fight wasn’t against Islamic movements on the ground, it was against Islamic ideas in the mind. It was about defining what was acceptable Islam and what wasn’t.
Because believing in khilafah suggests that democracy and parliaments are not the sacred, unquestionable models they are made out to be. That there are alternative and better models to govern.
Believing in shariah means believing that the solutions to our problems might lie in something other than secularism and the Western political canon.
Seeing homosexuality as sinful challenges the liberal creed that individual desire sits above all else.
Supporting Palestine affirms the ummah, a global community bound by faith, over the fragile nation state borders colonial powers painstakingly carved to keep us divided.
These ideas weren’t dangerous because they encouraged violence. They were dangerous because they challenged the ideological pillars the West holds dear. They opened doors for Muslims in the West to imagine a future for the ummah outside Western frameworks, outside Western expectations. And unlike our brothers and sisters living under dictatorships, Muslims in the West still had the space to say these things aloud.
That frightened the establishment. That is why that space needed to be firmly closed shut.
What Prevent ultimately exposed was not the danger of Muslims, but the fragility of Western freedom. Freedom of speech, belief, and thought were celebrated, until Muslims spoke, believed, or thought outside the approved script. Step beyond the boundary of liberalism, and you weren’t “free” anymore. You became an extremist.
We saw this clearly when Prevent evolved into “muscular liberalism,” and when schools were told to enforce “British values,” and coercion replaced confidence.
Yet despite two decades of surveillance, suspicion, and state interference, something remarkable happened: the Muslim community did not break. Our beliefs did not evaporate. Our identity did not dissolve. Yes, we had our divisions and we had our sellouts like Quilliam and certain Muslim political figures. But as a community, we remained rooted.
And that resilience matters, because our future is bound to the future of the global ummah. Just as we are realising that Palestine cannot be free while the surrounding Muslim lands remain chained by dictators, the Muslim diaspora has a vital role to play in the intellectual and moral revival of the ummah.
We are not separate from it. We are part of it.
Those ideas still matter and that vision is still pertinent for the ummah to move out of its current situation.
يُرِيدُونَ لِيُطْفِـُٔوا۟ نُورَ ٱللَّهِ بِأَفْوَٰهِهِمْ وَٱللَّهُ مُتِمُّ نُورِهِۦ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ ٱلْكَـٰفِرُونَ
They wish to extinguish Allah’s light with their mouths, but Allah will certainly perfect His light, even if the disbelievers detest it. (as-Saff 8)
Living For Islam 