Twist on familiar assimilation questions: Where are trends leading Islam in U.K. (and U.S.)?

THE QUESTION:

Where are current trends leading Islam in the U.K. (and what about the U.S.)?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

As in the United States, the Muslim minority population is growing steadily in the United Kingdom, up 107% since 2001 to exceed 3 million -- even as participation in many Christian churches declines.

The odds are good that British society will be reshaped by the inner workings among followers of the world's second-largest religion. That underscores the importance of the new book "Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain" (Bloomsbury) by Ed Husain.

This depiction of Britain is rather unnerving, though France apparently faces a more fraught situation. There the enforcement of "laicite," rigid separation of religion from the state originally aimed at Christianity, limits sensitivity to Muslim concerns and adds to long-running alienation and failure to assimilate. Current disputes, for instance, involve public schools' headscarf bans and unwillingness to provide alternatives to pork on cafeteria menus.

British author Husain is a practicing Muslim, political consultant and adjunct professor at America's Georgetown University. A sympathizer with militant "Islamism" in his younger days, he now advocates a tolerant and modernized form of the faith and that shapes his narrative.

Just before COVID-19 hit, Husain toured London and five other cities in England, two in Scotland, and one each in Wales and Northern Ireland, mingling with fellow believers and non-Muslims at the grass roots to discern trends. His knowledge of the faith, reputation as an author on Islam, study overseas and command of languages like Arabic and Urdu aided the sort of access denied to outside investigators.

While older British Muslims tended to assimilate, he found, many more recent immigrants are suspicious or hostile toward their adopted nation and their neighbors, isolating to create what's somewhat a country within a country.

How a British scribe's study of Islam helped explain Pakistani immigrant gangs' sex crimes

I haven't spent substantial time in London in several years, and, frankly, I generally feel little pull to revisit.

But I would have liked being there earlier this week to attend what promised to be an interesting talk by a leading British investigative journalist on how his knowledge of religion -- Islam in particular -- helped in his reporting a crime story that officials were loathe to explore too closely for fear they'd be accused of religious or racial bias.

I'm referring to a talk by Andrew Norfolk of The Times, the Murdoch-owned weekday daily, organized by Lapido Media, the online arm of the London-based Centre for Religious Literacy in Journalism.

Norfolk was interviewed by Lapido for a piece published in advance of his talk. During the interview, he spoke about how his knowledge of South Asian Islamic culture in Great Britain enabled him to uncover what Lapido called "the grooming of teenage white girls by gangs of Asian men -- and the blind eye turned by the local council and police force."

(At the Monday night event, Lapido also launched what it called -- incorrectly -- the "first guide in the world to religious literacy for media professionals." I say incorrectly because on this side of the pond journalists have long been able to profit from the similar work of the Religion News Association, to which I belong. Not that Lapido's effort, Religious Literacy: An Introduction, isn't a welcome contribution. I mean, our own tmatt wrote the last chapter.)

Norfolk's work on the gangs story led to his being named 2014 Journalist of the Year by the British Journalism Awards, the organization that doles out such accolades in the U.K.

Here's the top of Lapido's advance story.

ANDREW Norfolk remembers the time when mentioning religion at work was so taboo that ‘it was as if you had burped at a party’.

That was in a regional newsroom in the 1990s.