Empire’ Muslims Coming Home: from Partition to Power

Empire’ Muslims Coming Home: from Partition to Power

In 1947, British officials looked at the map of the subcontinent and saw not peoples, cultures and histories, but corridors, bases and buffers. They encouraged and managed a partition that carved out a Muslim majority glacis in the northwest, a Pakistan that would serve imperial strategy long after the Union Jack was hauled down in Delhi. What they did not imagine was that, within two generations, the human fallout of that cartographic violence would be voting, legislating and governing in the imperial core itself. Empire’s Muslims have come home — not as subjects, but as citizens, mayors, ministers and potential makers of Britain’s future.

Partition displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands. It also set in motion the migratory chain that would eventually produce Britain’s large Pakistani and broader Muslim population. The post war British state, still addicted to cheap labour from its former possessions, welcomed workers from the new Pakistan into its mills, foundries and transport depots. They came from Mirpur, Punjab and beyond, filling the jobs that fuelled the “mother country’s” recovery. They were expected to remain invisible and grateful. Instead, they laid down roots, brought families, built mosques, opened shops and steadily converted temporary sojourn into permanent settlement.

The imperial eye had once looked at the northwest of India and seen “manpower of good fighting quality” and strategic airfields. Those same districts now supply Britain with councillors, lawyers, doctors, businesspeople — and a rising cadre of elected politicians. The grandchildren of men recruited as sepoys or mill hands now run city councils and sit on parliamentary select committees. The old imperial periphery has re appeared inside the metropole, not through conquest but through the mundane tools of citizenship, voting and party membership.

This is the deeper context for the striking images of Muslim mayors presiding over English towns and cities, and for the slowly thickening presence of British Pakistanis and other Muslims on the green benches of Westminster. When a Pakistani heritage politician occupies a senior cabinet post, including foreign or home affairs, it is not an anomaly; it is the logical endpoint of a long imperial arc. The subjects of empire, or at least their descendants, now participate in setting Britain’s foreign policy towards the very regions their grandparents left — Pakistan, the Gulf, Palestine, Kashmir. The line from partition to power is not straight, but it is traceable.

This emergent political class is not monolithic. It includes devout Muslims and secular liberals, social conservatives and left wing activists, business friendly centrists and firebrand critics of Western interventionism. Yet there are recognisable patterns. Many draw their electoral strength from dense, kinship based communities in post industrial towns and urban wards, where Pakistani and Bangladeshi families in particular have high turnout and strong party loyalties. For decades, these areas were treated as safe deposits in Labour’s electoral bank. Candidate selection was often managed through local patrons and biradiri networks rather than open ideological debate.

That machine politics is now encountering a new ideological energy, one that blends religious identity, anti imperial memory and ecological or social justice language. The recent by election in the Manchester area, where Muslim voters angry over Gaza, foreign policy and domestic Islamophobia gravitated towards candidates and platforms outside the traditional party duopoly, is an early sign of this shift. Alignments between Muslim activists and Green or left Green formations hint at something like a de facto “Islamic Green” axis: socially conservative on questions of faith and family, but radical on war, climate and corporate power.

This is less a formal party than a mood and a network. It draws on mosques and community centres as mobilising spaces, on social media as an amplifier, and on the moral vocabulary of both Islam and environmentalism. The shared enemy is a tired establishment that defended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sells arms to regimes bombing Yemen or Gaza, and preaches human rights at home while eroding them abroad. For a generation that has grown up watching Muslims killed “over there” and mocked or surveilled “over here,” the old post colonial script of loyal, deferential minorities no longer holds.

The symbolism is powerful. Once, Britain ruled large Muslim populations without granting them meaningful representation. Today, British Muslim and especially British Pakistani politicians can, in theory, help decide whether the UK recognises a Palestinian state, how it deals with India’s policies in Kashmir, or whether it continues to host foreign military infrastructure. The grandchildren of those shunted into refugee columns in Punjab now sit in rooms where decisions are made about borders, wars and sanctions. This is what it means for empire’s Muslims to come home: the imperial metropole becomes just another arena in which post imperial grievances and aspirations are negotiated.

That transformation produces anxiety as well as opportunity. For parts of the white majority, the sight of hijab wearing councillors, halal certified school menus and anti war marches led by bearded men chanting “Allahu Akbar” confirm a fear that Britain is being “taken over.” Behind the hysteria about “no go zones” and “Sharia courts” lies a deeper psychological shock: the imperial centre was supposed to set norms, not absorb them from outside. To see “colonial subjects” debating and sometimes defying the foreign policy of the once imperial state feels to some like a reversal of the natural order.

Yet the comparison with Pakistan itself is instructive. Pakistan created a state in which Islam was to be the glue and the banner, an instrument of unity and power. Over time, that instrument turned inward, devouring minorities and deepening sectarian fractures. Britain, by contrast, never defined itself as an explicitly Christian state; it relied on a looser, civic nationalism layered over an unspoken white, Anglican cultural core. The arrival of millions of citizens whose primary identity is Muslim tests whether that civic shell can hold without demanding civilisational erasure.

The risk for Britain is not primarily that it will “Islamise,” but that it will reproduce Pakistan’s mistake of treating religion as a tool. When Muslims are courted as a bloc for votes, then demonised as a bloc for security theatre; when foreign policy is crafted without regard to how it resonates in Leicester or Bradford; when mosques are either photo op backdrops or surveillance targets, the state instrumentalises faith rather than respecting it. The result is the familiar cycle of mobilisation and backlash, radicalisation and repression.

There is another path. The rise of Muslim origin mayors, MPs and ministers can normalise the presence of Islam in British public life, not as a threat but as a fact. A confident democracy can survive — even be strengthened by — a foreign secretary who knows Lahore as well as London, or a cabinet where the debate over Gaza is informed by people whose families have lived the consequences of Western intervention. The question is whether British institutions will allow this representation to mature, or whether they will panic at the spectre of an “Islamic Green” insurgency and slam the door shut.

Empire’s Muslims have come home. They live in red brick terraces and new build flats, run corner shops and law firms, lead Friday prayers and council meetings. Their presence in town halls and parliament is not a historical accident but the delayed consequence of decisions taken in imperial war rooms and viceroys’ palaces. The chickens have indeed come home to roost — but they have come with ballots, not bayonets. Whether they help Britain reckon honestly with its imperial past and build a plural future, or whether they become the latest scapegoats in a culture war, will tell us more about Britain than about them.

March 4, 2026