By Andrea Widburg
I spent one of the happiest years of my life in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Now, I’m afraid I’d be run out of town for being Jewish. Cementing that feeling is a video that’s circulating on X showing one of the newest members of the Leeds City Council celebrating his victory with a cry of “Allahu Akbar.”
In 1981, I got accepted to the University of Leeds for my junior year abroad in England. I was absolutely devastated. I’d had dreams of strolling through the medieval streets and quads of Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, I was being banished to the desolate north to a late Victorian institution.
I was so wrong to be disappointed. I adored my time in Leeds. No, it wasn’t all beautiful and medieval, but I had fun from beginning to end. Additionally—especially for a person coming from San Francisco—fall and spring dazzled me. To this day, I’ve never seen a more lovely spring than I did in Leeds when my daily walk between my flat and my classes took me through a park that had acres of snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, roses, horse chestnuts, and other feasts for the eye.
What I also discovered about Leeds was the sheer Englishness of it all. As a committed Anglophile since my childhood, I basked in the fact that Leeds felt like England. The same was not the case in Southern England. London was a cosmopolitan, multicultural city; Oxford and Cambridge had international student populations; and the more popular tourist destinations had visitors from around the world who drowned out the locals. But Leeds, specifically, and Northern England, more generally, were English.
And then I left Leeds and never went back.
In 2004, I met a non-Jewish woman from Leeds who told me something very interesting. Yorkshire, she said, was increasingly Pakistani and Bangladeshi in both the big cities and the small, oh-so-English towns I remembered.
She also told me that the incoming Muslims targeted the north because it was Jewish. This wasn’t because they believed that Jewish communities were safer or had better schools and housing. It was to drive out the Jewish population, which they did through low-level, chronic intimidation. A decade later, I heard the same from a young Jewish man raised in Manchester, which is second only to London when it comes to its Jewish population.
Leeds currently has only 6,700 or so Jews. Indeed, all of England has only around 260,000 Jews, compared to around 3,868,000 Muslims.
Speaking of Muslims, Leeds, the English city I once knew, has one of England’s larger Muslim populations. It was 5.4% in 2011 but is now 7.8%, a 44.44% increase in just 13 years. No wonder Leeds currently boasts one of the most notable mosques in England.
That mosque didn’t exist when I lived in Leeds. Back then, that mosque was a church. While Leeds isn’t in the top 20 Muslim cities in the UK, Yorkshire is generally following the trajectory that the woman told me about in 2004—it’s getting Islamisized.
This gets me to last week’s election for the 2024 Leeds City Council. This was an election that encompassed several regions that used to be individual towns but are now part of greater Leeds. The Labour Party maintained its hold on the city (unsurprising, for Leeds has always leaned left).
Among the winners were:
- Shaf Ali (Labour)
- Ashgar Khan (Labour)
- Mohammed Rafique (Labour)
- Mothin Ali (Green)
- Mohammed Iqbal (Labour)
- Javaid Akhtar (Labour)
Only Mothin Ali and Mohammed Iqbal had close races, with fellow Muslims nipping at their heels. The rest were runaway victories.
Mothin Ali was pretty excited about his victory. This is his celebration:
Note that he’s not talking at all about his ostensible country, the one in which he lives and in which he’ll now share governance. Instead, he’s celebrating a faraway people and Islam. By the way, when Ali isn’t calling for jihad (“Allahu Akbar” is the jihad cry) or celebrating Hamas, Ali is just a humble Bangladeshi-style gardener.
Mothin and Leeds were not the only ones. Bradford, a nearby Yorkshire town that used to be England squared, is now Muslim, too:
When I look at England, I keep thinking of the 1980 Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back—not the plot itself, but just the name. Once, England controlled a quarter of the globe—her Empire—bringing both Anglo-Saxon and Biblical values and stable governance wherever she went. England and the English were often deeply flawed, but those core values were and are good. But now, the former British Empire is striking back and taking England and the rest of the West with it.