Anti-Muslim hate crimes have risen to record levels in England and Wales, with new government figures showing offences targeting Muslims increased by 15 per cent in a single year, amid warnings that hostility is increasingly moving from attacks on mosque buildings to threats and violence against worshippers themselves.
Home Office figures published this month recorded 146,825 hate crimes in the year ending March 2026, a rise of 7 per cent on the previous year. Religious hate crime rose by 13 per cent overall, while offences targeting Muslims increased from 4,479 to 5,132 — the sharpest rise among the major religious groups recorded.
When Metropolitan Police figures are excluded because of changes to its recording system, 3,660 anti-Muslim religious hate crimes were recorded — the highest annual level since comparable data began in 2018. The Home Office itself cautions that police figures do not measure the full prevalence of hate crime because many incidents are never reported.
The statistics reinforce growing fears within Muslim communities that Islamophobia in Britain is no longer confined to online abuse or isolated acts of vandalism, but is increasingly manifesting itself through threats, weapons, arson and direct violence.
From Attacking Mosques to Targeting Muslims Inside
The British Muslim Trust (BMT), which receives government funding to monitor anti-Muslim hatred and support victims, recorded 78 incidents involving 64 mosques across the UK and Channel Islands between July 2025 and July 2026 — approximately one every five days.
More concerning is the escalating severity.
According to its A Year of Division report, 62.7 per cent of incidents recorded since November 2025 fell into the four highest categories of its seven-level severity scale, including sustained threats, the presence of weapons, threats to kill, arson, direct violence and alleged mass-casualty plots. Between July and October 2025, only 22.2 per cent fell into those categories.
“The defining shift across this reporting period is a movement from hate aimed at the mosque itself to hate targeting Muslims inside it,” the BMT warned.
The organisation also directly raised the role of political discourse, warning that rhetoric around immigration and integration can become “incendiary” and increasingly difficult to distinguish from hostility towards British Muslims.
That warning comes amid an increasingly aggressive political debate over Muslims, migrants and national identity, with parties on the British right competing to advance ever tougher positions on immigration and integration.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has for years argued that such hostility cannot be separated from the language and policies of the political establishment. Marking the anniversary of the racist murder of Muslim pensioner Mohammed Saleem last year, IHRC described an “explosion of Islamophobia, whipped up by the mainstream media, politicians”, while accusing successive governments of failing to confront the conditions in which anti-Muslim hatred has flourished.
Its analysis goes further than treating Islamophobia simply as the behaviour of individual extremists. IHRC research has identified recurring narratives portraying Muslims as security threats, incompatible with “Britishness”, resistant to integration and part of a demographic threat — narratives that have repeatedly crossed from fringe politics into mainstream public discourse.
Shia Institutions Have Also Faced Growing Hostility
The latest Home Office figures contain a particularly significant detail for Britain’s Shia Muslim community.
Officials recorded a sharp rise in anti-Muslim offences in March 2026 following the beginning of the US-Iran conflict on 28 February. September 2025 had already seen another surge during a period of protests and public disorder.
Earlier this year, IHRC had warned the Home Secretary about violence surrounding anti-Iran protests targeting Muslim community institutions. Particular concern centred on the Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale, one of Britain’s most prominent Shia institutions, whose charitable purpose is explicitly based on the principles of the Ithna Ashari Shia Muslim faith.
IHRC said the Centre had faced “organised violence” from hostile demonstrators and reported similar problems affecting religious centres and Iranian businesses elsewhere in the country.
The episode illustrates how geopolitical hostility towards Iran and the wider Axis of Resistance can spill over into the treatment of Muslims — and particularly visibly Shia institutions — inside Britain.
Watford Mosque Repeatedly Targeted
The national picture is also visible at local level.
Masjid Al-Ummah in Watford, Hertfordshire, which is being developed as a mosque and wider community centre, has faced repeated incidents. Plans for the site include a sports hall, fitness facilities, educational spaces and other services intended for the wider community.
Last October, crucifixes were sprayed on hoardings surrounding the site. A man subsequently admitted possessing a knife and an axe but was cleared of criminal damage. In February, model pigs were thrown into the mosque premises.
Mosque trustee Ammer Amin said the atmosphere had begun to feel like “almost open season” on Muslims, arguing that people were being emboldened by political rhetoric.
“It’s easy to say it’s the Reform party, but it’s not just the Reform party. It’s the Conservative Party as well,” he said. “They’re singing from the same hymn sheet. They’re almost competing.”
The figures therefore raise questions that go beyond policing and security cameras. The government provided £650,000 to the British Muslim Trust in 2025–26 to monitor anti-Muslim hostility and support victims, but recording hatred after it occurs does not address the political and social environment in which that hatred is produced.
For Muslim communities, the concern is increasingly not simply whether mosques can be protected, but why places of worship require growing levels of protection in the first place.
As BMT chief executive Akeela Ahmed warned, Britain needs to address the “root causes of hate against Muslim communities” — a challenge that inevitably includes confronting the normalisation of anti-Muslim narratives within politics, the media and public life itself.
