Respect Muslims Now 2

The Tory leader Badenoch’s comments attacking Sharia law and the burka must be understood not simply as dog-whistle populism or parochial ignorance, but as part of a broader Schmittian logic that underpins authoritarian and racist politics in the post-9/11 West. By designating Islamic practices as alien, illiberal, and incompatible with the so-called modern British state, she enacts Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction—the foundational gesture of fascist legal and political thought. In this worldview, Muslims are cast not as citizens to be included in the pluralistic project of democratic life, but as enemies whose difference constitutes a threat to social order.Her comments are not accidental missteps; they are the articulation of a sovereign exception—a political moment in which legal norms are suspended for a targeted population in the name of preserving the cultural “integrity” of the state. This is the logic that allows for entire communities to be treated as suspect, to have their traditions vilified, and to be threatened with legal exclusion or forced assimilation. 

It is precisely the logic used by far-right Israeli ministers like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whose fascist rhetoric has incited settler violence, displacement, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the guise of national security. The UK government has rightly sanctioned these ministers for inciting terror against a vulnerable population. And yet, at home, the Tory leadership engages in similar rhetorical practices—subtler perhaps, but no less dangerous—in stoking fear, division, and hate against British Muslims.This is Schmittian fascism in practice: defining the polity by who must be excluded, turning governance into a permanent state of exception for minorities, and masking authoritarianism in the language of order and civility. 

At a time when Muslims around the world are enduring unspeakable violence—facing genocide in Gaza, pogroms in the West Bank, and rising Islamophobia in Europe—it is morally obscene for a British leader to single out the burka or Sharia as “unacceptable,” as if Islam itself were incompatible with life in Britain.Such statements incite hate. They undermine democratic norms. And they betray the real promise of liberalism: not homogenization, but the coexistence of plural legal and cultural orders. Islam, as Gellner reminds us, is not merely a set of personal beliefs but a civilizational framework—capable of law, ethics, and institutional life—that offers profound resources for navigating the complexities of modernity. In attacking those resources, the Tory leader aligns herself not with defenders of democracy but with the very forces of authoritarian ethno-nationalism her government claims to oppose abroad.

This is not only hypocrisy. It is racism. And it is dangerous. It is the same structural logic that allows Israel’s most extreme ministers to advocate the mass displacement of Palestinians while calling it security. And it is the same political impulse that now threatens British Muslims with symbolic expulsion from public life. Such a politics must be named and resisted—for the sake of democracy, for the safety of all our communities, and for the future of pluralistic life in the UK.