A Christian at Islamic College London: What I Saw Beneath the Surface |
I never set out to become a witness to the West’s unraveling. I was just a minister seeking to show God’s love to people. In short, I simply loved Muslims—deeply and sincerely—and believed that the surest way to honor that calling was to study Islam from within its own intellectual world. That conviction led me to Islamic College in London. I was excited that I was going to learn under Muslim scholars. So, I wasn’t seeking conflict or controversy. Far from it. Instead, I was pursuing what I saw as a ministry of respect and understanding.
For a few years, the professors supported my work. Classmates welcomed my questions, and I completed an M.A. in Islamic Studies believing I had formed genuine friendships. Yet even then, during my repeated visits, something faint and unsettling tugged at me. I sensed cultural currents shifting beneath the surface of the city I had come to love, though I lacked words to describe it.
During those visits, especially when staying in neighborhoods with dense Muslim populations, I often felt as if I were walking through two London’s at once. It will be abundantly clear, and I interact with countless people, the British culture was not very evident. There was not much assimilation. Another culture has overtaken it, and many British elite were on board.
When I landed in London on October 7, 2023, I expected nothing more than a week full of scholarly conversations with Shia leaders. Instead, I stepped directly into the aftermath of Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians. Suddenly I noticed it had taken place below service that the city’s emotional atmosphere shifted with a speed that left me disoriented. Suddenly, it wasn’t the same London I thought I knew. Within minutes, I was added to a group text coordinating rallies, and the words “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “resistance” appeared in messages. I was stunned.
Later, a Muslim friend urged me to meet protest organizers, and was glad to introduce me to them. He insisted I had a role to play, but the invitation scared me to death. What have I got myself into? By the next morning, October 8, I saw with my own eyes, as I was headed to church in an Uber, coordinated demonstrations filled the streets. It felt less like a reaction and more like a mobilization. I realized that there was an organized network of Jew hatred that I didn’t know existed, at least in that magnitude.
Throughout that week, I took 22 Uber rides across the city, and 18 drivers delivered unsolicited monologues about Israel with nearly identical certainty. I was stunned by the vitriol. What I noticed was a narrative template toward the Jews that I later discovered was in the Quran. I found myself listening quietly, wondering how these views had become so widespread, so quickly, and so synchronized. With each ride, the sense of ideological cohesion grew more visible, and I felt like a visitor in a city I once understood. The London I loved for its diversity now felt dominated by a single, unchallenged narrative.
What I felt most was that the Church there was very weak. And that weakness carried a cost. That disorientation deepened when I watched American and European universities erupt days later with the same slogans and emotional choreography. It was then I realized I was witnessing the expression of a coherent transnational worldview, not a series of isolated events.
Inside the Islamic college, the rupture was equally swift and painful. When I publicly defended Israel’s right to exist,........