UK's largest Muslim gathering proceeds with enhanced security amid rising hate crimes

The temporary site sprawls across 208 acres in Hampshire. Fifty thousand people from more than a hundred countries have come for the weekend. Security staff—several hundred more than usual—move through the grounds. Police and emergency services coordinate from stations set up around the perimeter. This is Jalsa Salana, the UK's largest Muslim convention, now in its 60th year, and it is proceeding despite a climate of rising hostility toward Muslims across Britain.

A month earlier, another major Islamic gathering had been forced to shut down early. Twelve people were arrested at that event, three of them on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, after authorities uncovered what they believed to be a far-right plot against the gathering. The question hung in the air: would Jalsa Salana's organizers reconsider? Rafiq Hayat, who leads the UK chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community that runs the convention, was unequivocal. "Not once. Not for a second," he said.

The numbers tell part of the story. Anti-Muslim hate crime in England and Wales climbed 19 percent in the twelve months ending March 2025. Across the country, one mosque is attacked roughly every five days. The threat is not abstract. Yet Hayat's refusal to retreat reflects a deeper calculation about how communities survive and ultimately thrive in hostile environments. The Ahmadiyya community has been in Britain for more than a century—established in 1913, with one of London's first purpose-built mosques constructed in 1926. Hayat himself arrived in 1967 and has witnessed the full arc of British far-right movements, from skinhead violence to Enoch Powell's infamous speech to the rise of the British National Party.

When the Ahmadiyya community built a mosque in Morden during the 1990s, hundreds of BNP supporters protested at planning meetings. Rather than withdraw, the community did something deliberate: they created a liaison group. They invited church leaders, local officials, police, and community members to monthly meetings at the mosque, with a local councillor chairing. The first two gatherings were heated. Thirty years later, Hayat said, those same officials will not make decisions without the community's involvement. It is a model born from necessity and sustained by patience.

But the threat facing Ahmadi Muslims is not monolithic. They face persecution from far-right extremists and also from Muslim extremists, both internationally—particularly in Pakistan—and within Britain itself. In 2016, Asad Shah, an Ahmadi man, was killed outside his shop in Glasgow in a religiously motivated murder by another Muslim. "The saddest part is that it is sometimes easier to deal with the rightwing than with some Muslim extremists," Hayat reflected. Yet he also noted that when the community holds large events, many young Muslims who are not Ahmadi attend. At a recent iftar, about 60 percent of attendees were young Muslims from outside the faith.

Hayat's answer to the current climate is visibility, not retreat. He tells Ahmadi children they must not be ashamed of being Muslim in Britain. He urges the broader Muslim community to engage with people outside their faith, to counter misconceptions through personal encounter. He pointed to one woman who had shared her location with her husband before visiting an Ahmadi mosque, instructing him to retrieve her if she did not check in every fifteen minutes. After experiencing warmth and welcome, she wanted to return with her family. "You don't see my colour any more," she told Hayat. "You see the human being behind it. This is the key to peaceful coexistence."

The convention opened on Friday with prayers, speeches—including an address from the community's global leader, Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad—and the raising of a union jack at the center of the site. MPs, bishops, and other public figures are expected to attend. The enhanced security is real and necessary. But so is the deliberate choice to remain present, visible, and engaged in the life of the country.