How Did George I Possibly Miss His “Substantial” Number Of Muslim Subjects?

While enjoying The Independent yesterday, this blog came across this “fact” shared with us by Kate Hughes in a July 26 “Invest & Save” piece on “Islamic” banking in Britain. It CANNOT be allowed to pass without comment:

There has been a substantial Muslim community in the UK for at least 300 years, so UK financial companies may have been a little slow to cater for their monetary needs. But mainstream financial groups are quickly waking up to the fact that there are some 2 million Muslims in the UK whose financial needs must be met…

Ms Hughes shares that background intro offhandedly, as if it is all just so much long-standing common knowledge. Sort of as if, you know, Elizabeth II also is current queen. The problem is it is not nearly as accurate.

First of all, Britain as of the 2001 census (the most recent one) had only 1.591 million — not 2 million — Muslims. While it is certainly possible that the Muslim population has increased by nearly half a million in a mere 7 years, Ms Hughes might have waited for the next census to confirm that, or opted for the lower figure until we know for sure. Regardless, she offers it without batting a liberal eye.

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But it is the preceding, first sentence, that is the true whopper: “There has been a substantial Muslim community in the UK for at least 300 years…” Putting aside the issue that there wasn’t a “UK” three hundred years ago (that term properly dates only from 1801), that statement is apparently based around whatever constitutes her personal definition of “substantial.” Since she doesn’t tell us, that definition evidently is to be left to our imaginations.

Given that she used the word “substantial,” though, one wonders why she didn’t supply a census figure, a percentage of the total population, or even a general guess — much like her “some 2 million” observation regarding the present?

This blog likes “facts,” which might move you to ask why on earth it bothers with The Independent? In any case, in liking facts it is hardly the only one that feels that those who put forward what are hirtherto decidedly less than well-known “facts” MUST cite a source. Even if The Independent doesn’t seem to demand it of its writers, the rest of us out here are taught to do that when we first start to produce term papers around age 13.

Yet Ms Hughes doesn’t bother. Presumably we are all just supposed to know she is on target. Thus she obviously feels it is unnecessary to offer us knuckleheads out here any hint as to where she could possibly have gleaned the information to support that incredible statement.

So how about some information? Take Newham, in London. According to the 2001 census, Newham was almost 25 percent Muslim. And how about back in, say, 1851?:

…The 1851 Census of Religion was a separate census carried out at the same time as the main Census of Population. It assumed that everyone was Christian…

Why would that official assumption then have been made? Because most were Christian, or were at least nominally, so counting Christian sect membership was deemed more statistically worthwhile than counting Muslims (or, for that matter, Jews)? Or, in other words, Muslims were hardly “substantial” enough in number to rate as a concern for officialdom. (Remember also that that religious census was willing to count Roman Catholics, hardly the most popular of Christians in the Britain of that era. So there is no reason to believe there would have been a deliberate effort to avoid counting “Mohammedans.”)

Now we perhaps can better understand Ms Hughes’s not mentioning an actual figure: there isn’t one readily available. Also, consider this: London’s first purpose built mosque (and remember, we are talking here of London, the capital, largest city, and trading heart of the country and the empire for “at least 300 years”) dates only to 1941, 90 years later.

Those facts, and various others — [In} 1641 [a] Document refers to “a sect of Mahomatens discovered here in London” — would appear to confirm that Britain’s Muslim population was not at all “substantial” prior to WWII according to any definition of that word most readers would readily appreciate.

Or does one “discover” a “substantial” population, out of the blue, in 1641? Or does one, actually, “discover” a tiny group that wasn’t there before, but has now appeared suddenly among a much larger majority? One might think so unless, of course, Ms Hughes can easily explain where that “substantial” population did all of their worshipping, why census takers had never noticed them, and especially why banking never took them into account (no pun intended)?

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A reason for The Independent’s attempted over-inflating of the importance of Islam in historical Britain may be easily surmised. It is trying to convey an impression of Islam as long-rooted and widely important in British domestic society, thus justifying perhaps major alterations to British society today to better “assimilate” its Muslims of today.

But that’s muddled thinking at best. For there is no question there were small numbers of Muslims in historical Britain. And there is also no argument about the pressing need to “assimilate” Britain’s now about 3 percent (is that “substantial”?) Muslim population.

What is journalistically unconscionable is to try to support an argument for altering British institutions via a flippant attempt to concoct an impression that Britain has always had a “substantial” Muslim population. After all, had there always been one, there would be no need now to try to “assimilate” one today. Nor would there be any need to make allowances for its particular religious character, because long ago those moves would have been made.

Perhaps that we are having this discussion NOW itself demonstrates that “sharia” was not a major concern of business, society, or of George I? And why might that have been the case? Well, how about this radical notion: because there weren’t nearly as many Muslims around then, relatively speaking, as there are here now?

It couldn’t be that Britain’s about 3 percent Muslim population today is the result mostly of post-WWII immigration? That Muslims’ presence in Britain for centuries prior was solely on the decided foreign fringe of national domestic life? No, in Indy-speak, that simply cannot be allowed to be — even if that is far closer to “fact.”

If not, being “substantial,” one would have thought they couldn’t have possibly been missed? Which is likely why the mother-in-law, born and reared in London, had years ago told me that the first “blacks” she had ever seen in person on a street were American soldiers — enormous, smiling men, she said, who waved at her as they drove past in a jeep “during The War.” And that is presumably also why we notice, for example, in “Britain At War In Colour,” virtually no “black” faces and absolutely no men in “Islamic dress,” during all of the informally shot video footage of street scenes and routine life in London taken during 1939-41.

Their being “invisible” then must have been because that “substantial Muslim community” were all either preparing for, or hiding from, the Americans and the Luftwaffe bombing. Unlike today, that is. Right?