We need to talk about Ahmed Mohammed. He’s a Sudanese asylum seeker in the UK, and this week he was spared jail after being convicted of threatening a person with an offensive weapon in a public place. The public place was Speakers’ Corner in London, and the victim was a Christian preacher. In May last year Mohammed dragged the follower of Christ from his stepladder and threatened him with a knife. ‘I’m going to stab you’, he barked.
The trigger for his blind rage was the preacher’s plea that he let Christ into his life. ‘What would you like to happen in my life?’ Mohammed had asked the preacher. ‘I would like to have the Lord in your life,’ came the reply. According to the prosecution, this was the ‘catalyst’ for Mohammed’s wrath. He went immediately to fetch his knife, so enraged was he by this expression of Christian faith in a Christian nation.
Amazingly, it gets worse. Mohammed, who’s been in the UK since 2012, has 29 previous convictions for 67 offences. Three of those offences were thefts committed just weeks before he threatened a man for daring to give voice to Biblical beliefs. Then comes what I believe is the darkest part of this story. The court was told that ‘a number of people, including Muslims’ tried to dissuade the Christian from calling the police. Think about this: they had just witnessed a wild-eyed man jab a knife at a peaceful preacher and their instinct was to let that man go.
Every now and then, a news story comes along that doubles up as a snapshot of the state of the nation. This is one of those. It has an asylum seeker with a string of crimes who for some reason we won’t deport. It features a savage act of Islamist intolerance against the free expression of Christian beliefs and yet it barely makes a dent in the public consciousness. It stars a Muslim violently menacing a Christian and yet we’re told the crowd rallied to the Muslim’s defence rather than the Christian’s.
It’s all there. Our withered sovereignty that prevents us from exercising dominion over who is in our country. Our cultural docility, where even a violent threat against a man of God fails to rouse the nation’s passions. Our fractious cities, where crowds are as likely to side with a knife-wielding maniac as they are with a cordial believer in Christ. And the fraying of our devotion to justice, so that even a man who commits that most unthinkable crime – violently seeking to silence another’s freedom of expression – is spared jail. Mohammed was sentenced to 22 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years.
That this drama unfolded at Speakers’ Corner heaps yet further allegory on this tragedy. For if even that free-wheeling corner of Hyde Park is not safe from the alien cultures of Islamist intolerance and mob sympathy for a Christian-persecuting knifeman, then we really are screwed. If Speakers’ Corner falls, Britain falls.
This isn’t the first time Speakers’ Corner has been invaded by a burning animus for the Christian faith. In 2021, Hatun Tash, the ex-Muslim turned Christian preacher, was slashed with a knife after daring to wear a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt to Britain’s best-known free zone. In 2023, an Islamist fanatic by the name of Edward Little was sentenced to life in jail for plotting a gun attack on Speakers’ Corner – his key aim was to murder Tash.
Be honest. Does that name, Edward Little, mean anything to you? Do you remember his case? It is astonishing that Speakers’ Corner can be rocked by so much violent Islamist rage and yet it barely registers in the public mind. Two knife attacks and a gun plot, in just five years, all with the twisted aim of metaphorically ripping out Christian tongues. And we just forget about it. We move on.
Anyone who has visited Speakers’ Corner lately will have glimpsed a terrible truth
Speakers’ Corner has been a space for rowdy expression since the mid-1800s. Marx was a frequent visitor, and later C. L. R. James and George Orwell. It survived epoch-shaking debates over capitalism, war, the vote, women’s rights. And yet it seems it might not survive the march of Islamist dogma.
Anyone who has visited Speakers’ Corner lately will have glimpsed a terrible truth – it has become an unforgiving domain of Islamist agitation. Young men in draping thobes hold forth on Islam and physically bristle at those with different beliefs. I remember the Speakers’ Corner of my youth: mad, yes, but fun too. There were ageing socialists on soapboxes, pained young Christians, surrealist blatherers, and poor souls who 200 years ago would have been in Bedlam rather than Hyde Park. It was ridiculous and fascinating and – most crucially – free.
No longer. It has a menacing air now. Christians are no longer safe. No one is if they deviate too strongly from Islamic beliefs. A High Court free-speech case in 1999 celebrated Speakers’ Corner as a cornerstone of British liberty. It ruled that freedom of expression extends to ‘the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome, and the provocative’. I want that culture back.
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