In February, the United Kingdom government appointed a working group to provide a definition of “anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia”, which should have completed its work by the end of August. In the summer, Conservative MP Nick Timothy and a phalanx of like-minded groups waged a campaign against any such definition, which they argued would stymie free speech for those who wish to criticise Islam.

Since then, the government has been cowed into silence and delay. Last week, the BBC published a report suggesting that the definition will not use the word Islamophobia at all, opting instead for “anti-Muslim hostility”.

This is a mistake; hatred of Islam lies at the very heart of racism towards Muslims. And while the British state fails to even name Islamophobia, Muslims face an unprecedented level of danger. The unwillingness of the British government to name and confront Islamophobia is a scandal, one that is barely noticed by mainstream media.

Before the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the number of reported attacks on Muslims in England and Wales was already high and stood at 3,432. In the year up to March 2024, it went up by 13 percent, and a further 19 percent by March 2025. These most recent figures exclude London, due to changes in crime recording by the Metropolitan Police, so the increase is probably higher.

According to the most recent data, without London, 24 percent of religious hate crimes targeted Jews, and 44 percent were committed against Muslims. In addition, Muslims are consistently more likely to be victims of assault, stalking and harassment.

It is somewhat miraculous that Islamophobic attacks in the UK over the last two years have not resulted in anyone being killed. Mob violence in the summer of 2024, which followed the murder of three girls in Southport by a non-Muslim attacker, was marked by the targeting of mosques from the start. This year, there have been multiple attacks on mosques, including arson. In December, police in Northern Ireland arrested several members of the so-called “Irish Defence Army” over a plot to attack a mosque and migrant housing in Galway, the Republic of Ireland.

In the face of the rise in hate crime, the UK government doggedly campaigns against anti-Semitism – as it should – but is not investing anywhere close to the same political capital in protecting Muslims. The state’s approach to defining both forms of racism make this unevenness very clear.

In December 2016, the UK adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which is highly controversial due to its conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. By contrast, the UK government has dragged its feet on adopting any definition of Islamophobia.

The draft definition that the BBC published on December 15, which does not mention Islamophobia, is deeply inadequate, and indeed dangerous because it gives a blank cheque to those who want to attack Islam. This lack of protection was inevitable. In the working group’s terms of reference, the government insisted on “the unchanging right of British citizens … to criticise, express dislike of, or insult religions and/or the beliefs and practices of adherents”.

Imagine, for a moment, that the government specified that a definition of anti-Semitism should allow people to insult Judaism. Even a cursory historical understanding of anti-Semitism clearly shows that hostility to Jews and Judaism have been inseparable across millennia: From the medieval Blood Libel, which accused Jews of killing Christian children for ritual purposes, to today’s “replacement theory” that Jews are orchestrating the corruption of the so-called “white race”.

Similarly, Western persecution of Muslims has been intrinsically connected with, and driven by, opposition to Islam, from medieval times until the present. Whether during the Reformation of the 16th century in Europe or the colonialisation of North Africa and Asia in the 19th century, Western thinkers and political leaders commonly saw Islam as an inherently imperialist and violent religion, dedicated to world domination, either through holy war or conspiratorial methods.

In the 16th century, German theologian Martin Luther labelled both Jews and Muslims as “fanatics”, that is to say, religion-inspired violent revolutionaries. In the 18th century, the French scholar Alexandre Deleyre wrote that when “government is absolutely founded upon religion, as among the Muslims; then fanaticism directs itself chiefly outwards, and makes this people an enemy of humanity”.

The leaders of the French and British empires were obsessed with the notion that Islam bred an inherent potential for revolutionary violence, which had to be guarded against through surveillance, censorship, and a politics of “moderation”.

The persisting influence of this conception of Islam as a source of violent conspiracy is easily traced through the 20th and 21st centuries in the West, most obviously since the start of the “war on terror” in the early 2000s. These ideas cut across the political spectrum and sit at the centre of the UK’s migration panics since 2015, when war and the rise of ISIL (ISIS) prompted an exodus of refugees from the Middle East.

The hatred of Islam, based on centuries of Western thought about that religion as an existential threat to Christian civilisation, is the root of a panoply of Islamophobic ideas: That Muslims are all potential terrorists, oppressors of women, sex predators, and obsessive theocrats.

In this context, to claim that Islam is not a target of Muslim-hating vitriol actually facilitates racism. It gives carte blanche to those who attack Islam with a searing passion – a hostility that fuels to verbal and physical violence against Muslims. To celebrate such attacks as the expression of “free speech” is to glorify hatred.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.