Islamophobia Action Group · Strategy workstream · v2.6
How showing up protects us. Five jobs, laid out along a river: what hits the community, what we do back — and how we'll know whether anything actually changed.
This is a proposal. Nothing in it is agreed yet — it only becomes real when the seven decisions at the end are made. We have written it honestly on purpose, weaknesses included, so it can be properly challenged before anyone signs it off.
British Muslims protect their communities best by showing up more, not hiding more. Hatred loses its grip when our giving is bigger than our complaining, when our contribution to Britain is impossible to deny, and when our young people grow up knowing what being a British Muslim is for — not just what we're against. Everything IAG does fits one of five jobs (the "legs"). This page explains the legs, how we'll know if they're working, what equipment we already own, and what's still missing — so strategy stops being "whatever is loudest this week."
A note on the toolkit — it is proposed too. The MCBx platform and its add-ons (WriteToPower, YourVoice, OrgFinder, the Community Dashboard, askAdil, Academy and the rest), the Mizan excellence standards, the Islam & Citizenship curriculum, and the Charter itself are proposed tools and frameworks for the Muslim Council of Britain (mcb.org.uk) — built and demonstrable today on mcbx.app, but proposed for MCB to adopt as official infrastructure, not yet formally signed off. Where this document marks a tool “Live”, that means it exists and works as a prototype — not that MCB has adopted it. Adopting them is part of what this proposal asks for.
The problem
This plan exists because the pressure is real, rising, and increasingly organised. The latest counts:
Tell MAMA’s highest total since it began in 2011/12 — 5,837 verified, up 43% in a year; verified cases up 165% in two years.
Anti-Muslim offences in England & Wales, year to March 2025 — 45% of all religious hate crime, up 19%, spiking around the Southport murders. Excludes the Met, so an undercount.
Campaign tours naming towns, parliamentary networks, broadcast narratives — pressure that is planned, funded and increasingly mainstream, not random.
20–30% of adults feel little belonging locally; ~3.7m often or always lonely; the pandemic's mutual-aid surge faded. Weak neighbour relations are the soil hostility grows in — and the ground the early work tends. (Community Life Survey; ONS)
Sources: Tell MAMA 2024 annual report · Home Office hate crime statistics, year ending March 2025. Both are after-the-fact counts — exactly the kind of number this plan exists to get ahead of.
Other views
Before we set out our own plan in detail, honesty demands naming the field it sits in. This proposal takes one path through a genuinely contested area; a sceptical reader deserves the serious alternatives first — including the ones that cut against us. Each is answered in full further down.
| School of thought | What it says | What we do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Structural / decolonial Sayyid, Critical Muslim Studies, the Counter-Islamophobia Kit | Islamophobia is racism built into state practice, law and media — not a product of misunderstanding or of Muslim conduct. Counter-narrative and “good neighbour” approaches risk respectability politics: making Muslims translate grievances into reassuring language while the structural problem is left untouched. | The strongest objection to our PREVENT-conduct leg — and we hold the kit that makes it. Our answer: we act on conduct in obedience, not to appease (see “The foundation”), and we pair it with WITNESS + DEFEND, which name and resist structural racism directly. The neighbour framework even turns the tables — by mapping Islamic duty onto UK statute and British Values, it becomes a tool that puts the demand on institutions to engage, not on Muslims to behave. Both/and, not either/or. |
| Social contact / cohesion Pettigrew–Tropp, CREST, Together Coalition | Personal contact between groups measurably reduces prejudice — across 515 studies (r≈0.21), and even digitally (g≈0.25) and through “imagined contact” with British Muslims. | The evidence base for the 40 Doors leg. Contact doesn’t just feel right; it has a measured effect. This is what moves that leg from “believable plan” toward real proof. |
| Policy / definitional APPG vs the 2025 Grieve working group | Whether Islamophobia is defined as racism (APPG: “targeting expressions of Muslimness”) or as “anti-Muslim hostility” (the government’s 2025 non-statutory definition) is unresolved and politically charged. | Which definition IAG stands behind is a BUILD-leg decision — and now a live one (added to the decisions at the end). |
The honest tension: the first two schools disagree about the whole theory — one says structures cause hostility, the other says contact cures it. This plan deliberately holds both: do the contact and building work and name structural racism. Pretending the tension away would be the weaker move; living inside it is the harder, truer one.
The destination
One goal, on the Charter’s Vision 2050 horizon: a Britain where Muslim civic contribution is so visible, and so personally known on every street, that hostility has nothing left to attach to — proven with numbers, not asserted.
The four missing tools built; the two missing “eyes” opened. First cohort of yearly mosque check-ins returned — the baseline year. Every leg climbs to evidence step 2.
Pledged neighbourhoods measurably calmer than unpledged ones (step 3 evidence). Lessons taught in 150+ madrasahs. The response playbook tested in at least one national event.
The first curriculum cohort reaches adulthood. Tracked towns show hostility losing its grip — in incidents and in attitudes. The portfolio runs majority-early-river.
The route, backwards
A theory of change is built backwards: start at the destination and keep asking what must be true for that?
Hostility has nothing to attach to only if two things hold: neighbours know Muslims personally, and young Muslims carry a confident civic identity. Those hold only if the forty doors are actually known, the lessons are actually taught, and the everyday frictions are actually closed — that’s the PREVENT leg. PREVENT gets the years it needs only if the community is kept safe and confident in the meantime — which is what DEFEND (stop what’s coming), RESPOND (answer hate by building) and WITNESS (keep the score) buy: time, safety and proof. And all of it stands on BUILD — the coalition, the relationships, the seats at the table.
Every “only if” above is an assumption, not a fact. The assumptions register near the end lists each one, the grounds for believing it, and — more importantly — what would change our mind.
The foundation
This is not borrowed management theory dressed in scripture. Each leg has deep roots in the Islamic tradition — and the classical sources are explicit and documented, not decorative. The whole plan is the operational reading of those roots.
| Leg | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| PREVENT — the 40 Doors | Ḥuqūq al-Jār — the Rights of the Neighbour. Imam al-Dhahabi gathered the Prophet’s ﷺ teaching on this into a dedicated treatise (“Jibreel kept enjoining me about the neighbour until I thought he would make him an heir”), part of a tradition running through al-Bukhārī’s al-Adab al-Mufrad, al-Bayhaqī’s Shuʿab al-Īmān, al-Nawawī’s Riyāḍ al-Ṣāliḥīn and al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ. The 40 Doors framework is this body of law made into a habit — and it is now written: a full Ḥuqūq al-Jār guidance framework translates al-Dhahabi's treatise into khutbahs, audits, household practice and UK-law mapping (see the tools row and 07-huquq-al-jar-framework.md). |
| RESPOND — answer hate by building | Qur’an 41:34 — “Repel [evil] with what is better, and the one between whom and you was enmity becomes as though a devoted friend.” The RESPOND leg is this verse made operational — reinforced by the Prophet’s ḥilm (forbearance) under persecution in Mecca: Ṭāʾif, where he prayed for those who stoned him, and the amnesty at the conquest. |
| PREVENT — civic identity | The fiqh of citizenship. The scholarly effort (minority jurisprudence, and beyond it a positive “fiqh of citizenship”) to find the healthy middle between being a good Muslim and a good citizen — “integration without assimilation.” The Islam & Citizenship curriculum is this in the classroom. |
| BUILD — the covenant | The Constitution of Madinah. The Prophet’s ﷺ founding compact made citizenship — not religion — the basis of shared rights and duties: a “community of communities.” The MCBx Charter’s own foundation. |
The motive that ties it together — and it matters for what follows. We do the early, upstream work because the deen requires excellence (iḥsān) and God-consciousness (taqwā) — not because it appeases anyone. The Prophet’s ﷺ patience under persecution was worship, not public relations. Holding that distinction is what stops the “good neighbour” work from becoming respectability politics — the objection “Other views” (above) takes head-on.
The big picture
Each column is one leg, in river order — PREVENT earliest (upstream), WITNESS latest (downstream) — and the earlier you act, the cheaper it is. Read a column top to bottom: the pressure it answers, the signals that tell us it's happening, the leg itself, and the tools we act with. BUILD isn't a stage on the river — it's the foundation running beneath all four (the slowest work, but the earliest, highest-leverage investment). The dashed loop matters most: what we record and how we respond becomes the lesson that improves the early work. Click any box to jump to the detail.
Four legs in river order — PREVENT (upstream) to WITNESS (downstream) — with each leg’s response time shown inside its box, not strung along the axis. BUILD is the foundation beneath all four, not a downstream stage: it’s the slowest work (years) but the highest-leverage, earliest investment. The signals and tools rows are honest audits: green = working, amber = informal or hand-cranked, red = missing. The weakest eyes and emptiest toolbox are both in the PREVENT column — we see and act best where it’s already too late.
Is the river even the right picture? One serious objection — from the critical study of Islamophobia — is that it mislocates the source: it places “Muslim conduct” upstream, when the real wellspring of hostility is racism built into state, law and media, not anything Muslims do. We take that seriously, and it changes how the PREVENT-conduct column should be read: we act there not to appease, but because being a good neighbour is required of us regardless of how others behave — a duty the tradition frames at the level of faith and the Day of Judgement, not public relations (see “The foundation”). The fall in hostility is a bonus the Qur’an even promises — not the reason. The full disagreement is set out in “Other views”, above.
What counts as success
There's a difference between what we did and what changed. Most organisations count what they did and call it success. We won't. Three levels — and most stop at the first.
"4 webinars run. 500 packs downloaded." Proves we spent the money. Says nothing about whether anything changed.
"Mosques that took the pack had fewer parking complaints. Youth can name 3 positive role models." The "so what".
"Hostility has lost its grip in this town." Years out. Predicted by the early signs, confirmed by the after-the-fact counts.
Early signs vs after-the-fact counts. Early signs tell you where things are heading (how many mosques teach the citizenship lessons; how many families know their 40 doors). After-the-fact counts tell you what already happened (incidents, sentencing) — by the time they move, the damage is done. Almost everyone only counts after the fact; that's why they're always firefighting. Every measure on this page is tagged one or the other. The approach follows the Resolution Foundation's indicators dashboard: a themed set of measures deliberately mixing "today" and "forward-looking", broken down locally, refreshed on a schedule.
The five legs
Each leg has a different job and a different clock. Most groups do one or two well; IAG should run all five — though never equally at once. Tap a leg to open it.
Always on · earliest in the river · the leg most groups skip because it's uncomfortable. We name it.
Closes legitimate grievances that hostile actors weaponise. Not victim-blaming — strategic responsibility.
Reactive influencers are symptoms of an absent positive offer — fighting them fails; making them irrelevant works.
Roots — Ḥuqūq al-Jār (al-Dhahabi): the documented law of the neighbour, of which 40 Doors is the operational form. Evidence it works — personal contact measurably lowers prejudice (Pettigrew–Tropp meta-analysis of 515 studies, r≈0.21; digital contact g≈0.25).
Days · midstream · when something is about to happen, or already happening, we respond.
Charter link — "serve the common good": protection received is one half of the Covenant of Reciprocity.
Months · after an incident · our response can do more than repair. It can prove the Charter is real.
Roots — Qur’an 41:34: “repel evil with what is better, and your enemy becomes as a devoted friend”, and the Prophet’s ﷺ ḥilm under persecution. The Covenant of Reciprocity in action: give more than you receive.
Weeks · after the fact · someone has to keep score.
Charter link — "act with justice": witness is the precondition of accountability.
Years · the slow undercurrent beneath everything · can't be measured weekly, but you can measure whether you're investing.
Roots — the Constitution of Madinah (citizenship as the basis of shared rights) and the fiqh of citizenship. Live decision: which definition of Islamophobia IAG stands behind — APPG (“racism… targeting Muslimness”) vs the government’s 2025 non-statutory “anti-Muslim hostility”. Vision 2050: Unite · Empower · Serve.
Depth of change
Counting sign-ups isn't enough — we need to know how far each mosque, household or young person has actually travelled. So every area of change has three depths: Connected (they've touched the work), Improved (something is genuinely different), Transformed (the change has stuck). Two rules keep it honest: the early signs may track movement at every level, but only the Transformed row gets claimed as success; and the yearly measure is movement between rows — never raw sign-up numbers.
| Safety | Neighbourliness | Civic voice | Identity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connected | Attended Martyn's Law webinar; downloaded the pack | Signed the Good Neighbour Pledge | Used WriteToPower once; joined the coalition | Madrasah enrolled in Islam & Citizenship |
| Improved | Emergency plan in place; drill completed | Pre-Ramadan letter sent; parking protocol running; knows 10 of 40 doors | Committee met its councillor this year; responded to a consultation | Modules being taught; youth attended a civic programme |
| Transformed | Certified site; zero incidents at prepared site over 12 months | All 40 doors known by name; reciprocal visits both ways | Standing council relationship; mosque leads a consultation response | Young person names 3 positive civic role models unprompted |
Who we track: the mosque, the household, the young person, the partner organisation — each gets a row per column. Mizan already grades everything on a four-step ladder (Basic → Good → Better → Best), so this drops straight in: a mosque's yearly check-in places it on the grid; next year's shows the movement.
Our eyes
A plan is only as good as its eyes. Below is everything we currently use to find out what's happening — and the audit is candid: we're well covered after incidents and while hostility is brewing (islamophobiauk, askAdil, Broadcast Monitor), still dependent on a few sharp people in the chat layer, and nearly blind at the early end of the river.
| Asset | Watches | Status | Notes / owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| islamophobiauk.co.uk — incident map, iOS + Android apps, weekly digest | Downstream | Live | Shar. Chrome extension in development; Wycombe Islamic Society official partner. |
| broadcastmonitor.org — continuous broadcast-bias monitoring | Midstream | Live | Sky News, GB News, TalkTV captured round the clock; speaker-attributed transcripts scored against Ofcom Code §5; public, citable, regulator-ready share URLs. Refreshed every 5 minutes. |
| Ongoing social-media monitoring (X, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram) | DEFEND · brewing hostility | Missing | Today this is people scrolling — the WhatsApp intel feed is sharp but human and unsystematic. Broadcast Monitor covers TV; nothing equivalent watches the platforms where campaigns actually organise (location naming, fundraising spikes, narrative testing). Shar's proposed rapid-response pipeline is the action half; this is the missing detection half. Partner lead worth exploring: CCDH (Centre for Countering Digital Hate) researches exactly this space — a data-sharing arrangement could close part of the gap without building from scratch. |
| askadil.com / askadil.org — rights guidance + automated reporting | Downstream | Live | Submits hate-crime reports on the user's behalf to 8 bodies (British Muslim Trust — the government-appointed reporting partner — Police UK, Police Scotland, IRU, Islamophobia UK, EASS, Stop Hate UK, Tell MAMA). Every report it routes also feeds the WITNESS evidence base. |
| Parliament tracker | Midstream | Live | How MPs talk about Muslims (islamophobiauk). |
| CPS sentencing tracker | Way downstream | Live | Justice outcomes — the confirming record. |
| IAG main WhatsApp intel feed | Midstream | Informal | Live narrative-tracking (Shar / JMO / NI contributors) — rich but person-dependent. The editorial sheet is the first step to structuring it. |
| Adversary monitoring (fundraising spikes, location naming) | Midstream | Manual | e.g. Tommy Robinson newsletter watch. Precursor signals to campaigns — currently hand-cranked. |
| CfMM — Centre for Media Monitoring | DEFEND + WITNESS · press & broadcast representation | Partner | Coalition partner whose whole job is monitoring how UK media covers Muslims — complements Broadcast Monitor (which scores live TV continuously). Worth agreeing who covers what. |
| Hope Not Hate actor research | Midstream | External | Actor-network maps (Christian Concern → NIG). Partner dependency. |
| mcbx community dashboard (Census 2021) | Context — all positions | Live | Who lives where, at neighbourhood level (~1,500 people). After-the-fact by nature. |
| Mizan assessment returns | Upstream | Partial | The instrument exists — 215 criteria, Basic→Best tiers, several already civic (civic-responsibility projects, neighbour-rights sound checks, safety drills, Local Public Health plans; CWE-CWR-23 even requires each org to publish its own ToC + KPIs). What's missing is the pipeline: mosques completing it yearly, results rolled up by neighbourhood, joined to the census map — plus 3–4 new criteria. Full 215-criteria scan (see 06-mizan-gap-analysis.md): councillor engagement (OSI-OSA-08), misinformation response (OSI-OSA-15) and parking/noise conduct (M1-Pra-04) already exist — the true gaps are a 40 Doors programme criterion, the pre-Ramadan neighbour letter, a named open-day, and ICE-adoption tracking. |
| Curriculum adoption registry | Deep upstream | Missing | Who is running Islam & Citizenship, where. Cheap to build off OrgFinder. |
| Youth sentiment survey | Deep upstream | Missing | How young Muslims feel about civic identity. 2–3 year build; FOSIS reach is the route in. |
The read: the most valuable things to build are the yearly mosque check-in pipeline (the 215-question instrument already exists — the gap is mosques completing it yearly and results rolled up by neighbourhood) and a simple register of who teaches the citizenship lessons. Without those, the PREVENT leg flies blind.
Our hands
Eyes tell us what's happening; these are the hands that change it. The verdict matches the Charter's own "Saviour to Systems" shift: the technology mostly exists — what's missing is not software but packaging (ready-to-use campaign kits) and coordination (response plans agreed in advance). A "no one's wired the buttons up" gap, not a technology gap.
| Tool | Serves | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| WriteToPower | DEFEND · midstream | Live | Letters to MPs and councillors. The single highest-leverage CTA tool — "respond to consultation" and "write to your MP" are both this under the hood. The gap is per-campaign templates (drafting labour, not tech). |
| YourVoice | DEFEND + BUILD · midstream | Live | Community ideas and consultation input — the listening half of advocacy. |
| Petitions | DEFEND · midstream | Ad hoc | parliament.uk / 38 Degrees links circulate in chat and expire unnoticed. Candidate for a 7-day featured slot on the IAG site with a decay rule. |
| Mizan Compass + criteria | PREVENT · upstream | Live | Organisational excellence standards. The civic-health module (the depth matrix above is its question set) slots straight into this existing assessment machinery. |
| OrgFinder | BUILD + RESPOND · all positions | Live | 1,600+ organisations mapped. The coalition register, the "find your local affiliate" router, and the distribution list for any national→local playbook. |
| Community Dashboard map | Context · all positions | Live | Census 2021 at neighbourhood level on a searchable map — the ready-made shell the scoreboard reuses for its joined view. |
| islamcitizenship.org.uk | PREVENT · deep upstream | Live, underused | 50 free scholar-endorsed lessons; piloted in 30+ madrasahs against 500+ orgs in the MCB network. Pure leverage waiting — adoption push costs distribution, not development. |
| Academy + Class Manager | PREVENT · deep upstream | Live | The delivery infrastructure the curriculum rides on. |
| Amplify + Community Inbox | RESPOND · downstream | Live | Cross-network broadcast and member messaging — the dissemination layer for coordinated responses. |
| askAdil | WITNESS + DEFEND · downstream | Live | Rights education plus automated reporting to 8 bodies; doubles as a sensor (every routed report feeds the evidence base). |
| 40 Door pledge page | PREVENT · deep upstream | To package | The signature campaign: sign-up, checklist, mosque scoreboard. The content now exists — the Ḥuqūq al-Jār guidance framework supplies the scholarship, the household practices and the audit. What's left is the web wrapper, not the thinking. |
| Ḥuqūq al-Jār — neighbour guidance framework | PREVENT · upstream | Drafted | A full multi-stakeholder framework built from al-Dhahabi's treatise: khutbah series, 6-week halaqah, reflexive harm audit, neighbourhood-liaison role, Ramadan iftar, open-door events, household practices — each mapped to UK statute and British Values. The Good Neighbour kit, essentially done; it needs packaging and distribution, not authoring. |
| National→local response playbook | RESPOND · downstream | Missing | "When X happens nationally, every affiliate does Y locally" — pre-agreed, so 500 orgs don't invent a response each time. Organisational, not technical. |
| Reciprocity ledger | RESPOND · downstream | Missing | Public counters of building-acts (events held, funds raised, neighbours served) — the visible proof the Charter is lived, not declared. |
The read: every missing tool is packaging or coordination — none needs new platform engineering. The four missing items above, plus the two missing "eyes", are the complete build list for making this whole plan real.
The scoreboard
One view, for any postcode: who lives there, what's brewing against them, and what the local Muslim institutions are actually doing about it. Half of it already exists. Refreshed quarterly, local, and checkable.
Who lives where, in what conditions. The mcbx.app community map — Census 2021 at neighbourhood level (~1,500 people). After-the-fact by nature.
Hostile narrative trends, fundraising spikes, location targeting. Hope Not Hate covers actors; Broadcast Monitor now covers broadcast narrative live (scored against the broadcasting rules, quotable). Early warning.
What mosques actually do. The Mizan check-in exists (215 questions, several already civic); the gap is mosques completing it yearly, results rolled up by neighbourhood, and 3–4 new questions. Early sign.
How young Muslims feel about belonging. A youth survey, reached through FOSIS. Early sign — a 2–3 year build.
Two cautions before anything goes public. (1) Never publicly score an individual mosque — publish neighbourhood-level summaries only; this is for self-improvement, not shaming. (2) Assume hostile actors will dig through anything we publish — the population and lesson-adoption layers can be public; the sensitive layers stay members-only.
They run the most respected living-standards measurement operation in the country. The transferable discipline:
| What they do | Our version |
|---|---|
| Past, present and projected — they don't just describe today, they forecast and set a destination | Every neighbourhood gets a baseline and a 3-year roadmap, not just a current score (worked example below) |
| Two products with different jobs — an annual Audit (backward stocktake) and an Outlook (forward projection) | An annual Civic Health Audit (what changed) plus a forward roadmap per area (where next) |
| A defined priority population — they focus on low-to-middle-income families, not "everyone" | A defined unit: the LSOA (neighbourhood, ~1,500 people) and the mosque — not vague "the community" |
| Open, auditable data — every chart downloadable, a named contact, a fixed refresh cadence | LSOA-level data published openly, refreshed quarterly, with a named owner — credibility comes from being checkable |
| One adoptable benchmark — they distil all of it into the Real Living Wage: a single voluntary standard employers accredit against and display | The single most important move we're missing — see below |
The Living Wage move: one badge, opted into, displayed. The Resolution Foundation's biggest lever isn't the dashboard — it's that they turned a complex analysis into one number employers voluntarily commit to and wear as a mark. Our equivalent: a Good Neighbour Standard — a single accreditation a mosque earns by hitting the civic-health bar (curriculum running, 40 doors audited, a councillor relationship, the harm audit done). Voluntary, opt-in, displayed on the door and in OrgFinder, overseen like the Living Wage Commission, and sitting naturally at Mizan's "Best" tier. That is what turns a measurement into a movement — institutions want the badge, and earning it is the upstream work.
Before claiming any success, two questions — asked every time, as routine:
If incidents fall in a town, was that our campaign — or just a quieter news month? Build the comparison in from the start: prepared towns against unprepared, pledged mosques against unpledged. Otherwise the scoreboard will be accused — fairly — of taking credit for things it didn't cause.
Before every new campaign, ask: who could this accidentally hurt, and what will hostile actors do with it? We've learned this twice already — the warning from Northern Ireland that public comments could endanger people there, and the dashboard-as-ammunition risk. Make the question a standing agenda item, not a lucky catch.
Worked example
This is the measure section made concrete. The LSOA — a Census neighbourhood of ~1,500 people — is the modern mohalla: the natural scale for the 40 Doors. The 40 Doors is the household habit; the LSOA is the unit we measure and set targets on. And here is the unlock: the Census already maps every one of the ~35,000 LSOAs in England & Wales for free. We start every area with a baseline and zero fieldwork.
Step 1 — what we already know, before doing anything (one illustrative inner-city LSOA; figures for illustration)
| Layer | What the data shows | Source | So what |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who lives here | 41% Muslim · 28% under 16 · unemployment 8% vs 5% regional · 22% with no Level-4 qualification | Census 2021 (mcbx Community Dashboard) | A young population under economic pressure — the identity work matters most here |
| The threat weather | A far-right march named the town 6 weeks ago · 3 incidents logged this quarter · 2 hostile broadcast segments | islamophobiauk · Broadcast Monitor | Exposed right now — DEFEND and WITNESS are live |
| What we're actually doing | 1 of 3 mosques teaches the curriculum · no 40 Doors audit · 0 of 3 committees met the councillor this year | Mizan civic-health (proposed) | The early-river work is almost entirely undone — the gap the roadmap closes |
Step 2 — the roadmap to success for the area
| Leading indicator | Year 0 (baseline) | Year 1 | Year 3 — “Transformed” |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mosques running the citizenship curriculum | 1 of 3 | 2 of 3 | 3 of 3 |
| Households who know their 40 doors | not measured | baseline audit done | 40% audited and rising |
| Committees with a councillor relationship | 0 of 3 | 2 of 3 | 3 of 3, standing |
| Good Neighbour Standard accreditation | 0 mosques | 1 mosque | 3 — area certified |
| Lagging confirmation | set baseline | council noise/parking complaints falling | complaints down & sustained; local sentiment up; no successful hostile campaign |
That is "a roadmap to success for the area." The Census hands us the start line for nothing; the civic-health layer adds the behaviour; the roadmap sets the destination; and movement up the Connected → Improved → Transformed tiers is the score. Repeat for any LSOA — and prioritise the ones where the demographic pressure and the threat weather overlap. It even satisfies the "Was that us?" test by design: compare roadmap neighbourhoods against matched LSOAs with no programme.
The honest read
If the legs aren't named, drama decides where effort goes: every alarming headline drags everyone into DEFEND, and the early-river work never gets resourced. Named, the balance can be checked every quarter. The honest working estimate: most of our effort — roughly two-thirds or more — sits at the wrong end of the river, reacting and recording after things happen. That's an estimate, not a measurement; making it measurable is the scoreboard's job. One small, real snapshot below.
A snapshot, not the whole portfolio: the first 13 items in the website editorial queue — 8 of 13 (62%) score-keeping (WITNESS), none building, none answering hate with kindness. Not a criticism of anyone — it's what happens when the jobs aren't named. Now they are, it can be fixed on purpose.
The people
Eyes, hands — and now people. The 23 partner organisations on the IAG site, sorted by the leg each is best placed to carry. This is a first pass for partners to correct — most sit in more than one leg — and the same honest pattern appears a third time: score-keeping is crowded, while the early-river work is carried by the smallest organisations.
| Leg | Partners best placed | Coverage read |
|---|---|---|
| PREVENT | FOSIS · The Muslim Vibe · Muslims in Rail · HFIC · Convert Muslim Foundation · Woolf Institute (interfaith) | Willing but light — mostly smaller organisations, and nobody yet owns the two flagship early assets (40 Doors, the citizenship lessons). |
| DEFEND | MEND · IRU · Muslim Safety Net · MLegal | Solid — advocacy, victim response and legal muscle all present. |
| RESPOND | Muslim Charities Forum · Muslim Women’s Network UK · Together Coalition | Thin for the ambition — the response playbook needs these three plus the 500 affiliates behind them. |
| WITNESS | Islamophobia UK · CfMM · CCDH · Prevent Watch · British Muslim Trust · Runnymede Trust · Equi | Crowded — seven organisations keep score. The need here is coordination (who covers what), not more capacity. |
| BUILD | MCB (convener) · MAB · CAIR (US peer — lessons, not delivery) | The convening exists; the cross-party relationships and the candidate pipeline still need owners. |
How to use this: it answers the question the framework asks every member — “which leg does my organisation operate in?” It is also the RESPOND playbook’s distribution list, the first cohort for the partner-organisation row of the depth matrix, and a third confirmation of the same skew: the coalition, like our effort and our watching, is strongest after the damage is done.
What we’re assuming
Six bets carry this plan. A plan that can’t say what would falsify it isn’t a theory of change — it’s a hope.
| Assumption | Grounds | What would change our mind |
|---|---|---|
| Contact works — people who personally know Muslims are far less open to hostile narratives | Decades of “contact hypothesis” research, and lived experience | Two years in, high-contact (pledged) areas show no difference in complaints or local sentiment |
| The vacuum thesis — a confident positive identity out-competes the reactive influencers | Plausible but thinly evidenced. Our biggest bet | Youth survey shows curriculum cohorts drift to reactive content at the same rate as everyone else |
| Conduct fixes remove ammunition — closing real frictions reduces hostility, not just complaints | Hostile campaigns visibly recruit on local grievances today | Complaints fall but local incidents and sentiment don’t move |
| Mosques will measure — enough complete the yearly check-in for the data to mean anything | Mizan accreditation gives a reason to return it; measuring itself drives behaviour | Under 30% of approached mosques return in year one |
| Affiliates will act — a national signal becomes local action once a playbook exists | Unproven — the honest weak point. “Hundreds of local actions within days” is a design goal, not a capability | First national test: fewer than 1 in 5 affiliates act on the playbook |
| Acting on our own conduct is obedience, not respectability politics | We fix conduct because the deen commands iḥsān and ḥuqūq al-jār, not to appease — and we run it alongside naming structural racism (WITNESS / DEFEND) | If the conduct work quietly displaces the structural advocacy instead of running beside it — i.e. we go quiet on state racism |
Outside our control: national politics, international events, media cycles, government policy and funding can swamp any of these signals in either direction — which is exactly why every claim runs through the “Was that us?” comparison. Safeguarding: the youth survey involves under-18s — it doesn’t run until it has passed safeguarding and data-protection review; curriculum delivery sits inside each madrasah’s existing safeguarding framework. Resourcing: the build list is days-to-weeks of packaging work plus ~5 hours/week of editorial ownership — decision 1. Until those are named and funded, this document describes a plan, not a capability.
Before this lands