Paul Scully, Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam and until recently Minister for London, informed listeners tuning into an interview on BBC Radio London on 26 February 2024 about “No Go areas” in Muslim neighbourhoods in Tower Hamlets (London) and Sparkhill (Birmingham), only to rapidly backtrack on, and revise, his comments the following day on LBC Radio. In doing so, he had joined a growing list of political figures expressing their disquiet with such unwelcoming areas in the UK and elsewhere in Western Europe.
In recent decades, the concept of No-Go areas has gained traction, mainly, but not exclusively, in right-wing circles throughout Western Europe. A combination of mass migration, family settlement, and marriage immigration; informal residential segregation; and so-called ‘White Flight’ has created what are considered to be parallel urban communities, where informal support networks, shared social values, and common cultural and religious identities bond residents together in ways that may conspire to keep them apart from host communities. Within these largely self-contained neighbourhoods, groceries and halal butchers cater to dietary needs, religious clothing is on display on public thoroughfares, madrasas (Islamic schools) provide traditional segregated education, and mosques provide a safe place in which Muslims can practise their faith. Many of these areas can also be characterised by high unemployment, low-paid jobs with a lack of career progression, poor housing, health disparities, and a lack of access to quality education and worthwhile job opportunities.
What is considered to be a No-Go zone is a matter of perception and lacks objective definition. So-called No-Go zones include both supposedly dangerous neighbourhoods, where there is lingering distrust between defiant residents and the repressive forces of law and order and visitors fear for their personal security, and also areas where the residents merely differ in their physical appearance, clothing, dietary habits, and religion from the dominant host community, and visitors feel alienated and insecure, even though they need fear no harm from the locals. Common to all these designated No-Go areas is a sizeable resident Muslim population. Frequently cited examples of the former include certain ethnic neighbourhoods in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Mr. Scully’s No-Go areas, on the other hand, belong to the latter category, where perceptions of threat do not match up to the reality.
Islam is the fastest growing major religion in Europe. Immigration from Türkiye, the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia), South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan), East Africa (Somalia), and French West Africa (Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Senegal) has created an ethnically diverse and highly visible community of Muslims, belonging to a variety of denominations and differing in their commitment to the practices of Islam. Fears that Muslim allegiances to the Ummah (global Islamic community) may undermine their loyalties to the nation-states in which they reside and thereby foster extremism and terrorism, the belief that sharia law threatens and is inconsistent with domestic civil law, and the abhorrent practices of a small minority-including female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and honour killings- have fostered Islamophobic views which tar all Muslims with the same brush and justify hate crimes, such as verbal and physical attacks on Muslim women sporting headscarves and face coverings.
Economic marginalisation and faith-based radicalisation in response to misjudged Western military intervention in the Middle and Near East and in North Africa have fostered anger and disaffection among second- and third-generation migrants, in what some right-wing figures have described as “Muslim ghettos.” Unlike the enforced Jewish ghettos of medieval and early modern Europe, these latter-day British and European neighbourhoods have arisen by a process of default rather than from official policies of segregation, as immigrants have been forced into unappealing inner-city neighbourhoods from which local residents have departed for greener pastures in the suburbs and small towns, keeping their distance from incomers with whom they claim to share little in common.
The concept of No-Go areas is an unfortunate consequence of Western societies where grown-ups from different communities are pre-programmed to distrust and actively dislike one other, with seemingly little desire for compromise and dialogue. A combination of ignorance, prejudice, stereotyping, and inflammatory rhetoric, often mutually expressed, has produced a toxic situation which does not bode well for the future if allowed to continue unchecked.
Ashis Banerjee