In the Age of Dominance

From the series "New Western Views" by Marwan Bassiouni

When Nirmal Puwar wrote the seminal monograph ‘Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place’ in 2004, the opening chapter spoke about a communal Muslim prayer which took place in London’s Trafalgar Square in late 2001. The prayer followed a mass demonstration protesting the impending military intervention in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. As Muslims were breaking their fast in Ramadan, the echoes of the Muslim prayer reverberated around the square, a location historically constructed and architecturally coded for imperial commemoration, naval triumph and state power. For a fleeting moment, as Puwar observed, a site designed to reinforce national hegemony was transformed into a landscape where perceived ‘invaders’ claimed spatial belonging. Performing this collective act of worship during a period of intense global geopolitical volatility defied public and political mischaracterisations of Islam and Muslims.

Fast forward twenty-five years to the present day, and the issue of Muslims as ‘space invaders’ has re-emerged with renewed ideological fervour. During a public Ramadan event hosted in Trafalgar Square, Muslims prayed according to their customary practices and yet were subjected to intense public condemnation. Conservative politician Nick Timothy MP argued that act of prayer was as an ‘act of domination’ derived ‘straight out of the Islamist playbook’. Following up on his posts in the Telegraph, Timothy reinforced his position that public prayer was fundamentally a demonstration of ‘domination of public spaces’ and constituted a core element of the ‘modus operandi of radical Islam’.

Notwithstanding Trafalgar Square’s long-standing status as a democratic forum utilised by diverse secular, political and multi-faith organisations, political discourse framed Muslim congregations as uniquely sinister. The presence of praying bodies in a geography viewed as the epitome of British statehood and imperial heritage was treated not as an exercise of civic rights, but as a deliberate act of territorial encroachment. This rhetoric mirrors historic racialised panics regarding post-war Commonwealth migration into ‘white’ Britain, yet it reflects a distinct post-War on Terror evolution. Public Islamic worship is no longer framed merely as a failure of social integration; it is increasingly weaponised as evidence of an existential, counter-hegemonic conquest. 

To understand why public prayer triggers such acute political distress, one must engage with Puwar’s conceptualisation of the ‘somatic norm’. Puwar defines the somatic norm as the implicit bodily expectation that governs institutional and civic space, specially bodies that mirror “the corporeal imagination of power as naturalised in the body of white, male, upper/middle class-bodies”. When bodies that fall outside this somatic baseline enter spaces steeped in historical authority, for example, their presence is experienced by the dominant majority as a disruption. They are designated as ‘space invaders’, subjects whose occupancy of space is viewed as conditional, intrusive or inherently illegitimate. 

Trafalgar Square offers a textbook case of this spatial dynamic. Dominated by Nelson’s Column, flanked by bronze lions, and dedicated to imperial naval supremacy, the square’s iconography materialises a specific narrative of British power and sovereignty. When Muslim bodies perform sajdah (prostration) in this space, they introduce a competing semiotic and physical presence. Crucially, Islamic prayer is an act characterised by profound physically humility, spatial transience, and fluid temporality; it requires no permanent infrastructure and vanishes upon completion. Yet, through the lens of post-colonial anxiety, this transient ritual is inverted. The state of prostration is interpreted not as submission to the Divine, but an aggressive tactic of spatial occupation. 

This inversion illustrates what Sara Ahmed describes as the cultural politics of emotion, wherein minority bodies are pre-coded as ‘sticky’ with threat, as I examine in relation to the Prevent Duty, a counter-extremism measure operating in UK schools, and its impacts on Muslim teachers. The spatial tension generated by public prayer is not derived from physical obstruction or material harm, but from the destabilisation of the imperial spatial code, where everyone and everything must know its place. The framing of prayer as ‘territorial dominance’ is thus a reactionary mechanism designed to re-establish the baseline of white British sovereignty over the public domain. It signals a deeper anxiety that the post-colonial subject is no longer content remaining in the periphery but is actively asserting a right to the nation’s symbolic core. 

The evolution of anti-Muslim discourse over the past two decades marks a significant shift from assimilationist demands to existential territorial panics. Or perhaps for some, the latter was always there. The hyper-visibility of normative Muslim practice in everyday public space is now an established threat. This escalation is vividly demonstrated by public disruptions orchestrated by far-right and gender-critical activists. A notable instance involved activist Kellie-Jay Keen confronting Muslim men engaging in prayer in London’s Hyde Park. In recorded footage, Keen told the worshippers that their act of prayer was an ‘act of dominance’ and explicitly asserted that ‘this is not what we do in this country’. This wasn’t the first time that Keen was geographically concerned about Islam and Muslims ‘dominating the UK’ in public spaces. During the Unite the Kingdom protests in May 2026, Keen proudly declared on stage that ‘We have to remove Islam from every single place’, in order to save this country. These declarations, which are proudly Islamophobic and anti-Muslim, not only reveal a prejudice towards racialised Muslims but seeks to push these identities to the private space and ultimately, out of the nation. This framing performs a vital function in contemporary UK culture wars: it channels socioeconomic disenfranchisement and national identity anxieties onto visible religious minorities, transforming mundane disputes over public space into high-stake battles for national survival.

 [book-strip index="1"]

This open season for Muslims has direct violent consequences. Following the murder of Henry Nowak, we saw unrest in Southampton and violent disorder, with car windows smashed and Nigel Farage, calling for ‘pure, cold rage’ for the alleged two-tier policing, where white Britons are treated unfairly in comparison to ethnic minorities. The statement reflects a growing suspicion that non-white groups are given preferential treatment and leniency in comparison to white people, a claim which is both false and farcical. As the charity Maslahahas shown, the criminal justice system is structurally racist, especially when we consider the disproportionate uses of terrorism legislation against Muslim communities. The recent designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, and the sentencing of the Filton 4 with a ‘terrorist connection’ for damaging military equipment, demonstrates just how swiftly the language of terror attaches to causes, and the communities behind them, that the state finds politically inconvenient. 

The Belfast events of June 2026 laid bare exactly how lethal this misinformation ecosystem has become. On 8^th June, Stephen Ogilvie, a 44-year old disabled man, was attacked with a kitchen knife in north Belfast by a Sudanese man. Despite the horrific attack, what followed was something altogether more manufactured. Within hours, false claims spread across social media, with posts wrongly stating that Ogilvie had died from decapitation, misidentified the attacker’s nationality, and used a fabricated photograph of a stranger to illustrate their claims. Ogilvie’s own family were forced to issue a statement to police confirming he was alive and urging the public not to use the attack to ‘divide people or fuel hostility’. This was the architecture of a riot, which was fuelled by instigators like Tommy Robinson calling the attacker ‘a Sudanese invader’ and the rioters as ‘patriots’, who were standing against ‘the treasonous lot in Westminster’.

Then came Edinburgh. On the evening of 19^th June, five Muslims were attacked with a machete by a Scottish man, who when arrested, shouted that he was ‘protecting the country from Muslim bastards’. In the wake of the attack, Zara Mohammed, observed that the threat landscape has fundamentally shifted, calling it 'a bit of a gamechanger because traditionally we have focused on mosques being secure.' Her observation underscores how safety concerns have spilled beyond institutional walls and into everyday civic spaces. This idea of ‘protecting the nation’ against immigrants and Muslims has floated for decades now but has certainly become more prominent as social media has grown. This rhetoric is no longer confined to the fever swamps of far-right online spaces. It is now processed into shareable formats, often AI generated, complete with misinformation, yet amplified by figures with enormous platforms. We are increasingly seeing the convergence between big tech and fascism, especially with the rise of AI and algorithms in boosting false narratives for clout.  What was once the fringe is now the foreground. And the consequences are being borne not by those who stoke the fires, but by the people whose homes are burned, whose children are taunted at schools, and whose bodies are attacked.

As Muslims are attacked for worshipping in public, it’s worth noting that the suggestion to ‘just pray at home or in the mosque’ is not a guaranteed safety mechanism either. Mosques in the UK have been targeted: a mosque was set on fire in East Sussex, an Islamic retreat in Suffolk received a bomb threat, and a 14-year-old boy planned an attack on two mosques in Sutton. The Home Office has responded with funding to improve security for worshippers, but this cannot be separated from the same state’s role was caused harm to Muslim communities over the last two decades, from the invasive reach of the Prevent Duty to the widening of the terrorism designation to include non-violent activity. A recent report by The Runnymede Trust outlines not only the prevalence of Islamophobic abuse in the UK, but also the structural socio-economic disadvantages that continue to push Muslim communities to the margins of public life. This intersectional analysis illuminate how everyday spatial panics are compounded by structural inequality. 

These incidents reflect a broader structural pattern in which the spatial footprint available to British Muslims is steadily compressed. This narrowing and enclosure, directly compromises their ability to assemble freely without the looming threat of violence or hostile political rhetoric. That pattern raises a hard question: what does ‘belonging’ or ‘integration’ mean, when the places built to hold a community are treated as targets rather than protected as any other place of worship would be? For a growing far-right movement seeking political power, that narrowing is a victory. For those who have spent generations building homes in a country that meets with them hostility, it is a loss with no comparable win. This is not simply the result of individual acts of violence but is compounded by a media and political environment that continues to frame racialised Muslims as external threats. We continue to resist that framing, and the exclusion it enables.