The soft melody of Muslim prayer comes down the stairs from the first-floor mosque and out the front door into the cool noon air of Southport, a seaside town 30km north of Liverpool. It is Friday lunchtime and Ramadan will start later that evening. These are special prayers in advance of the beginning of Islam’s holy month – the first since the rioters came.
When the mob attacked last July, the air around Southport Mosque on St Luke’s Road had been filled not with the sound of worship and devotion, but with the din of smashing glass, the thud of bricks and savage snarls of bigotry and rage from the men who came to hate.
The day before, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana had stabbed three young girls to death a five-minute walk away on Hart Street, where children had gathered for a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class. They were making friendship bracelets when he walked in holding a 20cm blade.
Bigots spread the lie that Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to Rwandan Christian parents, was a Muslim asylum seeker. On July 30th a mob attacked the mosque, injuring 53 police officers. So began a wave of disorder that buffeted Britain for a week.
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Rudakubana, now 18, was sentenced to at least 52 years in prison last January after pleading guilty to the murders of Bebe King (6), Elsie Dot Stancombe (7), and Alice Da Silva Aguiar (9).
More than seven months after the attacks, Southport’s small Muslim community is trying to get back to normal. But it is a new normal.
The mosque’s neighbours rallied around it after it was attacked, helping to rebuild its front walls and replace its smashed windows. But these days all the glass is covered by metal grilles amid tighter security. The scars of last summer have yet to heal – for Southport or its Muslims. The barbarity of Rudakubana’s slaughter and the frenzy of the rioters have left a mark on the town.
“I’m an old man. Sooner or later I’m going to go, so I’m not worried about myself,” says imam Ibrahim Hussein, the chairman of Southport Mosque. “But I am worried for my community. People are anxious. They are upset. There is an undercurrent of racism from some, and you can feel it.”
The imam was inside the mosque with eight others when the mob attacked. Hussein, who has lived in Britain for more than 50 years, feared the rioters would burn it down around them.
Most people in Southport have been “wonderful” since, he says. “With the majority, you couldn’t have better neighbours. But now and again you get someone who spoils everything.”
Southport, a faded old Victorian resort with handsome thoroughfares but a few dog ears, is overwhelmingly a white town. Census data from 2021 puts the white population at 95 per cent, compared to the British average of 82 per cent. Just 1.2 per cent – barely 1,100 of Southport’s 95,000 souls – are Muslim, compared to 6.5 per cent across Britain.
Southport is hardly a pit of deprivation – unemployment is less than 5 per cent and during summer it is busier than on a crisp Friday in February. But still, any observant visitor should notice its economic wrinkles: the long-since shuttered shops that grow in number the further you walk east from the broad, main thoroughfare of Lord Street. Meanwhile, the pier on the deserted seafront has been shut since 2022 for want of £13 million (€15.7 million) in funding for a revamp to make it safe.
Rudakubana’s murderous actions have for more than seven months ensured that Southport is no longer just the moniker of a town on the Irish Sea. It is now also the label for one of Britain’s most shocking crimes and usually followed by “stabbings”.
After months of raw grief, the local authority has cleared away almost all the floral tributes. Last Friday, just before Ramadan began, the only flowers visible at the Hart Space were a bouquet beside a small, scented candle outside the door through which the killer entered to stalk those little girls.
Despite it all, Southport has not completely lost its sense of self or its Merseyside humour. Driving near the mosque I spot the incongruous sight of a man on a high Penny Farthing cycling past a kebab shop that is, somewhat inexplicably, named 2nd Wife. I laugh all the way back to my hotel.
Hussein, meanwhile, chooses to be sanguine amid the tension. “The chance of healing is always there. No matter what happens, you always get over it in the end,” he says.
Yet he wants a message to go out from Southport’s Muslims.
“We are no threat to nobody. We don’t do anything funny inside the mosque. There is nothing to fear from us. We work, we go home to our families. With most people in this town everything is as it should be. We are no different from anyone else,” Hussain says.
“But if you are afraid of us, then come and talk to us. Knock on our door and you will find us hospitable and kind. And, after Ramadan, you can even come in for tea.”
