16 July 2026

The East London Mosque's ELM Connex platform hosted another insightful evening this week, bringing together community members, students, activists and professionals for a discussion of what the Census reveals about British Muslim communities. The event was held in partnership with the Muslim Council of Britain.

Part of the Educate and Inspire lecture series, the session explored British Muslims in Numbers: Census Data for Community Changemakers, the MCB's analysis of Census data charting the demographic, social and economic trends shaping British Muslim communities over the past two decades. Opening the evening, the chair reminded the room of ELM Connex's purpose: connecting scholars, academics and leading experts with the community, in the fields of faith, history, science and philosophy.

The presentation was delivered by Dr Jamil Sherif and Fatema Sunderji of the MCB's Research and Documentation Committee, both authors of the report. Dr Sherif founded the Committee and is an analyst on the report, and has also played a central part in preserving British Muslim heritage through the ELM Archives Project, which established one of the first mosque archives in Western Europe. Fatema Sunderji is an analyst on the same team and holds degrees in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.

The presentation came in five parts, alternating between the speakers, each beginning with Census data and closing on a question for the community to sit with.

Religion in Society Today

Dr Sherif began with the Census itself, and what it records about faith in Britain. The Muslim population has grown from 2.8 million to 4 million in a decade, while the number of people reporting no religion has risen sharply, though only around half of that group say they do not believe in God. That led to the question closing his section: are we seeing a spiritual search, or a beliefs marketplace and can Islam be an option for people seeking to fill a spiritual void?

Mapping Muslims

Fatema Sunderji turned to where and how Muslim communities live, mapping Tower Hamlets, Newham, Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham against the Index of Multiple Deprivation, England's official measure, which scores every neighbourhood across seven domains of disadvantage. As she put it, it measures places, not people. In Barking and Dagenham the Muslim population has risen from 4 per cent to 24 per cent in twenty years. For Muslim communities in these boroughs the deprivation is concentrated in housing, which raised her closing question: are these concerns shared with the white working class?

Muslims in Numbers

Dr Sherif returned with the age distribution and what the report calls the demographic dividend, alongside signs of social mobility: Muslims in higher managerial and professional roles have risen from 6.6 per cent in 2001 to 8.2 per cent. He then set the Census against a list of far-right tropes and debunked them with facts taken from the census. On the claim that Muslims are a burden on the NHS, 11.4 per cent of doctors in Britain identify as Muslim. On the claim that Muslims do not speak English, 91 per cent report speaking it well or very well, against 98 per cent of the population overall.

Focus on Families, Youth, Women, Elderly

Sunderji returned to the shape of the Muslim household. Married couples with dependent children make up 35.7 per cent of Muslim households, the highest of any faith group and two and a half times the national rate, while around 180,000 Muslims live entirely alone, which she offered to the room as a quiet loneliness question for mosques and community centres. Across the four boroughs, 56.8 per cent of school-age children are Muslim, against one in ten across the UK.

The education figures were among the evening's more encouraging. Young Muslims started behind the general population in 2001 and had overtaken it by 2021. Young Muslim women now out-qualify young Muslim men, and in Tower Hamlets 24.4 per cent of them hold degrees, the highest of England's major Muslim districts. Those qualifications are not yet translating into work, with economic activity among Muslim women still well below the national rate.

The health gap opens with age: in Tower Hamlets, 40.5 per cent of Muslim women aged 65 and over report bad or very bad health, against 26.8 per cent of all women that age in the borough. Nearly a quarter of Tower Hamlets Muslims over 65 cannot speak English, concentrated among women. Her closing question was whether the community is prepared for old age, with the over-65 population set to grow several times over in the next twenty years.

Political Engagement

Dr Sherif closed with constituency analysis ahead of 2029 and the work of challenging elected representatives. The MCB, he explained, is non-partisan as far as political parties are concerned; its work is voter registration, manifestos, and checklists of questions for candidates. His argument was about arriving at a conversation with evidence in hand. Why does overcrowding among Tower Hamlets Muslims run at 46 per cent when other authorities manage better? Whether such gaps reflect lifestyle or structural discrimination remains, he said, an active research question. The report carries an appendix of further Census variables by local authority, with the codes to download the data.

A Rigorous and Practical Discussion

Questions were taken throughout the session rather than held to the end, ranging over the limits of Census data and the risks of treating a diverse community as a single block. Closing the evening, the chair thanked both speakers for a whirlwind tour of a historic publication, with something in it for journalists, for mosques and institutions, and for parents.

British Muslims in Numbers: A Statistical Compendium can be downloaded at mcb.org.uk/censusreport.