Afzal Amin, who is in his 40s, made his first appearance on television when he was a six- year-old pupil in a Church of England school in the Black Country.
“I was in a nativity play,” he chuckled late one night this week at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party’s conference in Birmingham called to debate how it could win the support of more Muslims.
On the face of things, members of Britain’s Muslim community – noted for their belief in self-reliance, business, hard work and small-‘c’ conservatism – should be drawn to the Conservatives.
The figures say otherwise. In 2010, 37 per cent of the rapidly growing Muslim population in Britain voted Labour, with just 12 per cent opting for the Conservatives. Significantly, 37 per cent did not vote for anybody, Mohammed Amin of the Conservatives Muslim Forum told the gathering, which included numbers of young Conservative candidates in next year's general election.
The focus on the Muslim vote was illustrated most graphically by Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist at the heart of the Conservatives' re-election campaign. On Tuesday, Crosby – who once weakly denied charges that he had once told Boris Johnson to "ignore the f***ing Muslims" – urged Conservative candidates to woo their support.
Overall majority Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend), which urges Muslims to get involved in politics, argues that Conservatives won just 16 per cent of all non-white voters four years ago. If it could have taken that figure to 36 per cent, matching the party's performance across Britain, prime minister David Cameron would have won an outright majority, Mend says.
Labour has long dominated the Muslim vote, partly because the party was seen as more open on immigration in the 1960s and later because of trade union influence in textile plants. The Conservatives have made efforts to make up ground. Cameron, for example, told a gathering a few months ago that halal slaughterhouse rules were safe “for as long as I am prime minister”.
In Brentford and Isleworth, Conservative MP Mary Macleod is defending a majority of fewer than 2,000 in next May's general election. Muslims account for one in eight voters in the constituency, voters the Conservatives had previously done little if anything to attract.
Since 2010, Macleod has developed ties with the local mosque, setting up a clinic and meeting its women’s group. She has even visited Pakistan to learn more about the people.
In the beginning, Macleod struggled to get invitations to events. Then, when she attended them, she was outnumbered by a dozen Labour councillors. Today, Macleod said she urges her fellow Conservatives to join her: “We have to be out there, we have to build ties with these communities.”
In Portsmouth, Muslim Conservatives helping efforts to oust the former Liberal Democrat and currently independent MP Mike Hancock have set up language classes for Muslim women.
Frequently, Muslim women are ignored, believed by party canvassers to be under the thumb of their menfolk. In some places that is the reality, but not everywhere, said Amy Gray, who is running for the Conservatives in Hackney and Stoke Newington.
“Remember the power of the matriarch in many Jewish and Muslim families. I talked to one Moroccan man. He said, ‘Talk to my wife. If she likes you, I’ll vote for you.’,” she said.
Hotbed of radicalism
Afzal Amin – who served one tour in Iraq and three in Afghanistan during his time as an officer in the British army – is running for the party in Dudley in the West Midlands. From the outside the Muslim community in Britain is seen as a hotbed of radicalism and resentment, unable or unwilling to link with a secular wider society. For Amin, such a picture is false, or if it is true it represents only a minority.
“Britain is the greatest country in the world in which to be a Muslim, the greatest country,” he said.
Many Muslims are cowed by the public debate about Islamic extremism but the 7/7 bombings prompted a shift. “Something extraordinary happened. Before, it was impossible to say, ‘I’m a Muslim and I’m a British’,” said Amin.
But not everyone believes the Muslim community is putting enough distance between it and extremist voices. “It is not happening in my name but we need to be saying this more publicly,” said Huddersfield orthopaedic surgeon Ghulam Abbas.
Too often, mosques are dominated by elderly imams with poor English, who watch Urdu-language television, effectively divorced from British life, he said.
“Some people here for years have not bothered to learn basic English. That is not acceptable.”