UK: “Nine years on from 7/7, the much-anticipated anti-Muslim backlash is yet to appear.”

‘Children as young as 10 are among those racially abusing Muslims in Britain’, shouted the Daily Mail last week; ‘Women targeted in rising tide of attacks on Muslims’, asserted the Observer; ‘Action needed to tackle “rampant” Islamophobia on social media’, urged the Metro. It is apt, perhaps, that on the ninth anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings, the spectre of Islamophobia has once again been looming large in the UK media. After all, the assumption that in Britain, and in the West in general, anti-Muslim sentiment is on the Mosque-burning, veil-ripping march has been one of the most persistent political and cultural narratives over the past decade or so.

Here’s Massoud Sahdjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission speaking in 2000: ‘Muslims in Britain face the same fate this century as Jews in Europe in the last.’ Here’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a commentator for the Independent, writing a few days after 9/11: ‘We brace ourselves again for a period of bile and beatings and hate mail… Islamophobia will once more erupt worldwide and be legitimised by some political leaders. It is okay to hate a Muslim again.’ Here’s former Birmingham City councillor Salma Yaqoob writing in the Guardian in 2006: ‘[Muslims in Britain] are subject to attacks reminiscent of the gathering storm of anti-Semitism in the first decades of the last century.’

Again and again, the idea of a seething, popular mass of anti-Muslim sentiment is invoked by politicos and pundits (some Muslim, some not). And again and again, this seething, popular mass of anti-Muslim sentiment never actually shows its face.