Many odd news stories emerged from Britain’s election campaign. None seemed more bizarre than the alleged attempt by a Muslim Conservative candidate to collude with the English Defence League, an anti-Islam group, on the back of opposition to the building of a new mosque in Dudley. The proposed mosque would fall within the constituency of Dudley North, one of two in the town, and the ensuing controversy forced the candidate, Afzal Amin, to resign from his party weeks before the election.
The tensions surrounding the mosque plans had pre-dated the campaign. Now they trickled further into the provincial politics of the "Black Country", as this part of England's west midlands, a former industrial powerhouse, is still known. Behind Dudley's story of local intrigue lies a much bigger process that will determine the future shape of Islam in Britain.
Few may realise that campaigns to build mosques - and campaigns to prevent them - are far from new. A century ago, they also accompanied the earlier phase of globalisation that saw large-scale Asian immigration not so much to Britain as to the United States. Like the planned mosque in Dudley, the first purpose-built mosque in America was also linked to the migration of Asian factory workers. Inaugurated in 1921, it stood just outside the birthplace of the production line at Henry Ford’s famous (and now derelict) car factory in Detroit. The parallels with Britain’s major communities of south Asian, mainly Pakistani, origin - in Bradford and Manchester, Birmingham and Dudley - are clear.
