It’s finally here.
After years of campaigning by Muslim organisations and communities, against the backdrop of record levels of hate crime, the government has finally chosen the holiest time of Ramadan to publish its definition of what it calls “anti-Muslim hostility”.
And what do we have to show for all that waiting?
A watered-down version of a definition we already had.
The 2018 All-Party Parliamentary Group definition of Islamophobia was endorsed by more than 800 community organisations, over 100 academics, and every major political party except the then-governing Conservatives. It was the result of genuine consultation and rooted in the lived experience of Muslim communities.
So why has it taken this government years to deliver something that appears deliberately diluted? Why was the recommendation of its own independent working group seemingly not good enough? And why, throughout this entire process, were grassroots Muslim organisations largely excluded from meaningful engagement?
This isn’t just about the wording of the definition – though many have already raised serious concerns about what was diluted and why. This is about the process that produced it.
The Macpherson Inquiry established a clear principle: communities must play a central role in defining the racism they experience. Yet that lesson appears to have been ignored.
The process has been marked by exclusion, by hand-picked representatives replacing genuine grassroots engagement, and by a government seemingly more concerned with managing political optics than listening to the communities it claims to protect.
And perhaps the most telling failure of yesterday’s announcement was what the government chose not to say.
In 2016, the UK government adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. That decision was taken quickly and with broad political consensus. Yesterday’s announcement could have been an opportunity to say clearly: we are doing for Muslim communities what we already did for Jewish communities nearly a decade ago.
Instead, that comparison went unspoken.
That matters because bad-faith actors, including much of the British media, have spent years spreading the lie that recognising Islamophobia somehow gives Muslims “special treatment”. The truth is the opposite. British Muslims are not asking for something extraordinary. We are asking for the same recognition and seriousness that other forms of racism rightly receive.
Fairness, not favours.
The key question is where we go from here. Organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamophobia Response Unit are not endorsing this definition at the present time. They are reserving judgement, recognising that a definition is merely a starting point.
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