Five men were injured in a series of attacks in Edinburgh at the weekend, two of them as they left a mosque, in an incident that police have treated as terrorism. Lewis Hawkes, 36, has been charged with five counts of attempted murder, each alleged to have been aggravated by reason of having a terrorist connection. He also faces charges of assault and robbery, breach of the peace, and culpable and reckless conduct. Online footage reportedly shows Hawkes shouting, using expletive-laden language, about “protecting the country” from Muslims. The Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) organisation has urged the authorities to treat the attacks as “Islamophobic, far-right terror”.
Attacks in Edinburgh and beyond
The Edinburgh attacks are not isolated. Muslim communities in Scotland have repeatedly warned of rising anti-Muslim hostility and far-right extremism. In the past year, a teenager was arrested and charged with terrorism for planning a mosque attack in Greenock, and several mosques, including Alloa Mosque, have been targeted with firebomb attacks. These incidents reflect a broader pattern of violence and intimidation that has left many Muslims feeling vulnerable and frustrated.
Deepening fear among Muslim communities
The fear felt by Muslim communities in the UK is both real and growing. More than half of Muslims (56%) said they had experienced prejudice based on their religion in the last year, according to a survey from the British Muslim Trust, the government’s official partner for monitoring Islamophobia. The Tell MAMA project, which records anti-Muslim hate incidents, tallied 6,313 verified cases in 2024 – a 43% increase on the previous year and the highest number since the organisation was founded in 2011. Assault cases rose by 73% between 2023 and 2024, while threatening behaviour surged by 328% in the same period.
Religious hate crimes reached record levels in England and Wales in the year to March 2025; 45% of them were directed at Muslims. The Islamophobia Response Unit (IRU) reported a 763% increase in Islamophobic incidents in the UK in the year after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. Tell MAMA recorded 4,971 incidents of anti-Muslim hate between 7 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 – the highest total in its 14-year history – and noted a “backlash against British Muslims”, particularly targeting Middle Eastern communities, visibly Muslim individuals, and Muslim women.
The true scale of anti-Muslim hate may be significantly larger. A Byline Times analysis suggested that police records underreport anti-Muslim hate crimes by nearly 90%, and Tell MAMA’s figures are also substantially lower than police data. Some crimes are not recorded as anti-Muslim even when they clearly target people perceived as Muslim: a woman may have her hijab pulled off, but if she is spat at and told to “get out of my country”, the incident may not be logged as a hate crime.
The fear extends far beyond the UK. In the United States, two white supremacist shooters killed three people at the Islamic Center of San Diego in May 2026 – the first ideologically motivated lethal attack on a mosque in the US this century, influenced by neo-Nazi accelerationism and the Christchurch mosque shootings. A survey in San Diego found that nearly nine in ten local Muslims felt less safe following the attack. In Europe, the independent academic European Islamophobia Report 2024 warned of “a disturbing normalization of anti-Muslim racism”. Nearly a quarter of voters in Europe now back far-right parties, and the report’s authors argue that such movements are pushing centrist politicians “to adopt exclusionary, securitized rhetoric targeting Muslim communities”. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) reported that 47% of Muslims in the EU experienced discrimination in the past five years, up from 39% in 2016.
Political rhetoric has fuelled these trends. The US president has said “I think Islam hates us” and has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, claiming the Quran “teaches some very negative vibe”. A Runnymede Trust report in 2024 argued that Muslims were increasingly portrayed as a menace to society. Dr Shabna Begum, CEO of the Runnymede Trust, stated that Islamophobia has become “the normalised currency of political conversation”. The result, as the peer Sayeeda Warsi put it, is that Muslims are “seen as fair game”.
The impact on community safety is stark. Mosques are targeted so frequently that the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has urged them to carry out lockdown drills, citing fears of threats and attacks following incidents such as riots in Belfast and a suspected arson attack on an imam’s home in Bolton. In Northern Ireland, the Amnesty International director suggested that anti-Muslim sentiment appeared to be a “more prominent feature” in the anti-migrant riots in Belfast this month than in previous racist violence there. Whether people are singled out for their ethnicity or religion can be unclear, even to perpetrators, and some are targeted because they are wrongly believed to be Muslim.
Calls for action and a fundamental shift
Critics argue that the government’s current approach is insufficient. A new hate crime strategy would be helpful, they say, but embedding the issue in a broader action plan to strengthen communities has diluted the focus. The government should also rethink its handling of funding to protect vulnerable sites such as schools and mosques: the current requirement that applicants must prove they have already faced hate crime leaves those sites unprotected until it is too late. Better regulation of social media is crucial, as disinformation – often promoted for profit or by foreign actors seeking to spread division – fans the flames. The European Islamophobia Report recommends that governments formally recognise anti-Muslim racism within National Action Plans against Racism and review counterterrorism frameworks that disproportionately target Muslims. In the UK, the government funds the National Online Hate Crime Hub to support local police forces in dealing with online hate crime.
But a much more fundamental shift is needed. Condemnation of hate crime is the bare minimum required. Politicians, and the public too, must be willing and ready to challenge the broader rise in anti-Muslim sentiment that feeds it.
