Jalsa Salana in Hampshire has had enhanced support from police, emergency services and local authorities

Security has been increased by several hundred additional staff at the UK’s largest Muslim convention, Jalsa Salana, alongside enhanced coordination with police, emergency services and local authorities, against a backdrop of growing anti-Muslim sentiment.

Last month, another big Islamic gathering was forced to close early after 12 people were arrested, including three on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, over a suspected far-right threat.

A report on the Spectator’s coverage of Muslims makes for grim reading. Conservatism is now focused on this minority to the exclusion of everything else

I start this column already resigned to the tune out, to the glaze over, the click away. This is not to say that I do not have faith in you, dear reader, to keep reading and caring. But I am aware, and this is central to the problem, that it is now normal, when it comes to a certain minority in this country, to speak of them as if they were some sort of plague. Islamophobia has become so common as to be mundane in large parts of the British media. Foremost among the offenders is Britain’s oldest political magazine: the Spectator.

A large and comprehensive report from the Centre for Media Monitoring reviewed 3,733 articles published in the Spectator relating to Islam or Muslims. Released last week, it criticised the publication for “a sustained and systemic pattern of biased coverage of Muslims and Islam”, according to the CMM, “with more than half of all relevant articles rated as biased over an eight-year period”. It is grim, grim reading.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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Five years after the ultra-conservative Islamists retook Afghanistan, students describe male pupils being beaten for minor rule breaches and inexperienced teachers struggling to deliver lessons

Before he leaves for Kabul University each morning, Hashmat* checks his face for the beard he has been ordered to grow. Male students are required to grow their facial hair and wear traditional Afghan clothes and those who fall short are punished. Hashmat says he recently saw a classmate beaten for wearing trousers.

“They look at you before they listen to you. If your appearance is wrong, you are already in trouble before the class begins,” he says.

Whenever I wore the baggy green, I was reminded of what that cap represented – a team that was stronger because each player brought something different

A cricket scorecard is pretty straightforward.

It shows you how many runs you scored, how long you played and whether your team won or lost. Cricket has always been appealing to me because of that honesty. The numbers don’t care about your appearance, where you were born or what you believe.

Hotel did not allow two Muslim women to wear full-body bathing suit, which has become bugbear of European far right

An Austrian court has found an alpine hotel’s ban on burkinis discriminatory, a politically explosive ruling in a country where the far right is on the rise.

The full-body bathing suit worn by some Muslim women has become a bugbear of the European far right, which has campaigned to restrict Muslim dress in public spaces.

Government’s former extremism adviser sounds alarm as idea that diversity is harmful becomes ‘mainstream view’

Two in five Britons believe Muslims cannot integrate into British society and more than half believe the country’s national identity is disappearing due to “diversity”, a report authored by a former government adviser on extremism has found.

Sara Khan, who stood down in 2024 as the UK’s first counter-extremism commissioner, said such views contrasted sharply with accompanying findings that showed 85% of Muslims “favour integration”.

Unmarried man and woman whipped 21 times each because they had violated province’s version of Islamic law

A young couple in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province have been publicly caned after a Sharia court convicted them of violating Islamic law by kissing during a TikTok livestream.

The court ordered the couple, a 22-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman, to be whipped with a rattan cane 21 times each for kissing without being married. At least 100 people witnessed the caning, carried out by a group of people wearing robes and hoods on a stage in Bustanussalatin City Park in Banda Aceh.

The royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion hears how witnesses are subjected to hate speech amplified by misogyny

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Vile, threatening abuse is being levelled at witnesses to the antisemitism royal commission, the inquiry has heard, while a Labor MP has said attacks on his partner were heightened because they were stacked with misogyny.

Meanwhile, data analysis has shown how quickly factual reports are transformed into conspiracy theories online, and that while there was a spike in antisemitism after the Bondi terror attack, there was a “huge spike” in anti-Muslim hate.