Twenty-five years after nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists murdered 2,977 people on 11 September 2001, Western states are unquestionably better protected against a repetition of that particular operation. Yet the world itself is less peaceful, Britain’s terrorism threat stands at SEVERE, jihadist terrorism remains the principal terrorist danger identified by the British security services, and the movement which produced 9/11 has spread far beyond the organisation which planned it. The difficult conclusion of this anniversary is that we became much better at preventing the last attack without defeating the religious and political ideas which inspired it. Nor should the problem be measured by terrorism alone. In Britain, arguments rooted in Islamic understandings of blasphemy, religious authority, sharia and communal solidarity have already produced intimidation, institutional caution, parallel norms and increasingly visible sectarian politics without requiring a terrorist organisation at all. For Catholics, the answer cannot be denial, collective hostility or an interreligious dialogue conducted on the understanding that the most important subjects must never be discussed. It requires truth, legitimate defence, serious engagement with Islam, evangelisation and the restoration of a confident Christian culture through marriage, family, children, conversion and the rebuilding of Catholic life.
At 8.46 on the morning of 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9.37, and at 10.03 United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew attempted to overpower its hijackers. By the end of that morning nineteen members of al-Qaeda, which the National September 11 Memorial itself describes as an Islamist extremist organisation, had murdered 2,977 people from ninety countries.¹
A generation has now reached adulthood for whom those events are history rather than memory. That distance creates a danger peculiar to anniversaries: the dead become numbers, the buildings symbols, the images familiar enough to lose their power to shock. Yet the victims were husbands and wives, parents and children, firefighters and policemen, office workers, cleaners, cooks, financiers, military personnel, passengers and cabin crew. Their killers deliberately chose civilian aircraft and civilian buildings because the deaths were intended to communicate something larger than murder itself. Terrorism requires an audience. On 11 September the object was simultaneously to kill, humiliate, terrify, inspire and provoke, using the technologies of modern global communication to turn an atrocity in New York and Washington into a spectacle watched almost everywhere.
St John Paul II understood the moral character of what had happened immediately. On 12 September he called the previous day “a dark day in the history of humanity” and “a terrible affront to human dignity”. Later, addressing the problem of organised terrorism more systematically, he affirmed that states possess a right of defence while insisting that such defence remains subject to moral and legal limits and that criminal culpability is personal rather than transferable to a nation, ethnicity or religion.² Those distinctions remain indispensable. The innocent Muslim neighbour does not acquire guilt because al-Qaeda murdered Americans in the name of Islam. But neither does that principle require anyone to pretend that the murderers’ religion, theology and conception of jihad were irrelevant to what they did.
A literal repetition of the 9/11 operation is substantially more difficult today. The attacks exposed extraordinary weaknesses in aviation security, cockpit protection, watch-listing, passenger screening and intelligence sharing. Cockpit doors were reinforced, security screening transformed, federal air-marshal deployments increased, passenger identities were checked systematically against watch lists, explosives detection expanded and intelligence became a much more important part of aviation security.³ Those measures inevitably attract criticism when experienced only as inconvenience, but the absence of another 9/11-scale aircraft hijacking is not an accident. Security services and governments learned from what happened.
Al-Qaeda itself is also weaker than the organisation which enjoyed sanctuary in Afghanistan at the beginning of this century. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022. Its senior command has been disrupted, its original infrastructure destroyed and its contemporary influence distributed increasingly through regional affiliates. Reuters’ assessment on the eve of this anniversary describes an organisation which remains resilient and influential within global jihadism but is nevertheless diminished and more decentralised than the apparatus which planned 9/11.⁴ If the question were narrowly confined to whether al-Qaeda central is now better placed to repeat precisely what it accomplished in 2001, the answer would plainly be no.
The difficulty begins when that success is mistaken for the defeat of the movement from which al-Qaeda arose.
The Threat Changed Shape
The United Nations now describes the threat from al-Qaeda and Islamic State as “multipolar and increasingly complex”. No single country or region can any longer be identified as the global centre of terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda’s central leadership remains comparatively isolated but retains ambitions for spectacular external attacks; al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has assumed greater ideological and operational importance; Islamic State persists through affiliates; and violent jihadist movements have expanded in West Africa, the Sahel and South Asia.⁵ The organisation that symbolised the threat in 2001 has weakened, while the religiously motivated ecosystem around it has dispersed.
The statistics require sobriety rather than exaggeration. The Global Terrorism Index 2026 records 5,582 terrorism deaths in 2025, down 28 per cent in a single year, while attacks fell by almost 22 per cent to 2,944. These are the lowest global totals since 2007. The terrible peak associated with the rise of Islamic State’s territorial caliphate has passed, and it would be false to claim that global terrorism is simply increasing on every measure. Yet the same report identifies Islamic State and its affiliates as the world’s deadliest terrorist organisation and lists Islamic State, JNIM, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and al-Shabaab as the four deadliest organisations in 2025. All belong to the jihadist milieu. More than half of global terrorism deaths now occur in the Sahel, where the geography of the threat has shifted dramatically since 2001.⁶
Europe presents the same combination of declining centralisation and persistent ideological danger. Europol’s 2026 terrorism assessment recorded forty-five terrorist attacks across the European Union during 2025, of which twenty-four were jihadist. Of 486 terrorism-related arrests, 347 were associated with jihadism. The organisational profile has changed, with online radicalisation, self-initiated cells and comparatively autonomous individuals creating security problems very different from those presented by a conspicuous training camp in Afghanistan.⁷ An intelligence agency can map a hierarchy and penetrate a network; a person radicalised largely through online material and requiring little more than a knife, vehicle or firearm may leave fewer operational traces.
Britain itself has no grounds for treating the matter as an American historical problem. On 1 May this year MI5 announced that the national terrorism threat level had been raised to SEVERE, meaning that an attack is judged highly likely. The Service stated explicitly that Islamist terrorism “remains the primary threat to the UK”, while noting the simultaneous growth of extreme-right terrorism.⁸ This is not an assertion produced by a polemical anti-Islam organisation. It is the official judgement of the British security system.
The existence of other terrorist ideologies changes nothing about the need for precision. An extreme-right terrorist should be identified as such; an Irish republican terrorist should be identified as such; political violence from revolutionary Left, anarchist or environmental movements should be described according to what it actually is. The same standard should apply where the motivation is Islamic. The peculiar habit by which specificity suddenly becomes objectionable when Islam enters the discussion has done considerable damage to public confidence because ordinary people can see the gap between the language employed by terrorists themselves and the evasions sometimes preferred by institutions responding to them.
Nuntiatoria has returned to that problem repeatedly. In Bondi Beach and the Refusal to Name Islamist Terror we argued that precision concerning an ideological motive is not the same thing as collective accusation. In A Religion of Peace? Imam Adam Kelwick’s Rhetoric and the Realities of Islamic Doctrine we examined the recurrent apologetic method by which terrorism, blasphemy penalties, apostasy sanctions and other contentious subjects are successively detached from Islam whenever they become difficult to defend, until the religion described to a Western audience bears remarkably little relationship to the arguments actually being made by Islamic militants or to substantial currents within Islamic history.⁹ Nuntiatoria’s criticism was not that every Muslim accepts those arguments. It was that declaring them “un-Islamic” does not answer them.
The distinction between Islam and “Islamism” can describe something useful, but it becomes misleading when employed as a diplomatic firewall. A Muslim who practises his religion peacefully, a political activist seeking the expansion of Islamic norms and a terrorist prepared to murder civilians are obviously not morally interchangeable. Yet it does not follow that the latter two cease to have anything to do with Islam at the point where their conclusions become objectionable to liberal opinion. The men who attacked America on 11 September did not imagine themselves to be secular revolutionaries borrowing exotic religious language. Al-Qaeda did not derive jihad, martyrdom, unbelief or the restoration of Islamic political authority from Marxism. Islamic State did not invent the caliphate from twentieth-century European nationalism. These movements understand themselves religiously and make arguments from within Islamic scripture, history and jurisprudence. Other Muslims may reject those interpretations, but rejection is not the same thing as proving that the interpretation possesses no Islamic pedigree.
The point is clearer when applied to ourselves. If somebody committed murder while invoking Catholic Scripture, Catholic theologians, Catholic history and what he claimed to be Catholic teaching, Catholics would be entitled to demonstrate that his reasoning was false. We could identify texts he had misused and explain what the Church actually teaches. What we could not plausibly do is announce that Catholicism had “nothing whatever to do with” his reasoning merely because its conclusion embarrassed us. The theological argument would still have to be made.
Jihadism is therefore an intra-Islamic theological, juridical and political problem before it becomes everybody else’s security problem. Recognising that does not implicate every Muslim in terrorism. It requires Muslim scholars and institutions to confront the religious arguments made by those who commit terrorism, rather than allowing Western politicians to perform the theological work for them by declaring in advance that the perpetrators have misunderstood their own religion.
The Problem Does Not Begin With Terrorism
There is another weakness in discussing Islam exclusively through the terrorism statistics. Terrorism represents the violent extreme of a much larger question concerning religious authority, social pressure, integration and whether legal rights remain meaningful where exercising them may expose a person to serious intimidation.
British polling illustrates the distinction. The major Channel 4/ICM survey of British Muslims found only 4 per cent expressing sympathy with suicide bombing and 4 per cent sympathy with terrorist acts as political protest. Those figures matter and decisively contradict any suggestion that most British Muslims support terrorism. The same representative face-to-face survey, however, found 18 per cent expressing some sympathy with violence against those who mock Muhammad, 23 per cent supporting areas where sharia would operate instead of British law, 52 per cent disagreeing that homosexuality should be legal and only 34 per cent saying they would report someone close to them whom they believed was becoming involved with supporters of terrorism in Syria.¹⁰ The proper conclusion is not that peaceful religious conservatives are terrorists. It is that some propositions relevant to the ideological environment surrounding extremism are held considerably more widely than terrorist violence itself.
More recent polling has continued to expose this distinction. J.L. Partners’ 2024 research for the Henry Jackson Society found substantial support for prohibiting depictions of Muhammad and for forms of Islamic political or legal preference. Policy Exchange’s 2026 polling in electorally significant areas with large Muslim populations likewise found extensive support for criminal restrictions upon perceived blasphemy and, most seriously, a significant minority willing to regard violence as potentially legitimate in response to public desecration of Islamic sacred objects or depictions of Muhammad. The geographical design of the latter survey means that it should not be treated as a probability estimate for every Muslim resident of Britain, but neither can the results simply be waved away.¹¹
The distinction between attitudes and conduct remains essential. A Muslim who thinks blasphemy ought to be illegal has not thereby threatened anyone; a Muslim who believes sharia morally superior to English law has not thereby committed sedition; a Muslim who regards homosexual conduct as sinful is not thereby a terrorist. Yet those qualifications do not require us to pretend that the beliefs are irrelevant when considering how Islamic religious norms operate socially. The peaceful advocate of a blasphemy prohibition and the assassin who murders a supposed blasphemer may differ completely about who has authority to punish, whether violence is permissible and what action should follow. They may nevertheless share the antecedent proposition that insulting Muhammad constitutes an offence of exceptional gravity. Serious analysis examines both the difference and the relationship.
Nuntiatoria has already documented what happens when that antecedent proposition acquires coercive social force. Preferential Treatment or Public Principle? The Question Schools Must Answer revisited Batley Grammar School, where in 2021 a teacher showed an image of Muhammad during a religious-studies lesson dealing with free expression. Protest followed; the teacher was removed from the classroom and eventually driven into hiding. The same article examined Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield, where accidental damage to a Qur’an in 2023 escalated into threats serious enough that a child’s family reportedly went into hiding, while his mother appeared publicly before community figures and sought forgiveness.¹²
Neither case required al-Qaeda. There was no Islamic State cell directing events at the school gates. The social pressure arose from a religious taboo sufficiently powerful that ordinary institutional relationships were inverted. A teacher whose lesson was lawful disappeared from normal life; a mother whose child had damaged a book found herself publicly apologising in the context of threats against him. Whether every person protesting intended intimidation is beside the point. The people actually threatened experienced an unofficial sanction which British law itself did not authorise.
The significance becomes clearer when Batley is placed beside the Coskun case. Nuntiatoria’s England’s Free Speech Test: the Coskun Case and the Return of Blasphemy by Prosecutorial Means examined the prosecution of Hamit Coskun after he burned a Qur’an outside the Turkish Consulate. Parliament abolished the common-law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in 2008, yet the Coskun litigation raised the uncomfortable possibility that offences framed through public order could become a functional substitute when the sacred object being insulted was Islamic.¹³ Our later article, The State Erased the Case File: Blasphemy Law by Stealth, placed the case within the wider development of an official definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” and the concern that protections properly owed to Muslim persons might slowly become administrative protections for Islam against criticism.
The RAF cadet case demonstrated the same tendency in a less dramatic but revealing form. Soft Blasphemy: The RAF Cadet Case and the Unofficial Policing of Thought in Britain examined the suspension of a trainee officer after he said during a structured national-security discussion that Islam represented the greatest threat to Britain. One may agree with that proposition, qualify it or reject it. The striking fact was that within an institution whose purpose includes analysing threats to national security, an assertion about Islam itself appeared capable of becoming a disciplinary event.¹⁴ A culture need not possess a statutory blasphemy law before people learn that certain conclusions about one religion carry unusual professional risk.
This is what terrorism statistics miss. A society may continue to possess freedom of expression formally while individuals calculate that exercising it over certain subjects entails danger to employment, safety or family life. Britain can congratulate itself that there is no law against insulting Muhammad while a teacher lives in hiding because he displayed an image of Muhammad. The contradiction is not resolved by pointing out that the threat came from private individuals rather than the state. Indeed, the problem becomes more serious when public authorities themselves begin adjusting behaviour in anticipation of the private coercion.
The same phenomenon appears in law and family life. In One Law for All: Sharia and the Challenge to British Democracy, Nuntiatoria examined the operation of sharia councils in Britain, particularly their position in marriage and divorce and the consequences for women whose religious marriages possess no civil registration. The issue is not that Muslims may not order their private religious lives according to their conscience. Catholic canon law does precisely that within its legitimate ecclesiastical sphere. The problem arises when a parallel religious authority acquires effective jurisdiction through communal pressure over matters in which British civil law provides rights which the individual may then struggle to exercise.¹⁵
The principle is straightforward. Religious freedom protects the Muslim’s right to believe that sharia expresses divine law; it also protects the Muslim woman who wants the protection of English family law, the Muslim who changes his religion, the Muslim who criticises an imam and the Muslim who concludes that Islam is false. The test of reciprocal religious liberty is not whether a community permits people to enter. It is what happens to the person who wishes to leave.
The Grooming Gangs and the Price of Institutional Fear
The grooming-gangs scandal belongs to a different evidential category and should not be lazily folded into jihadism or blasphemy. Child sexual exploitation is not a doctrinal command of Islam, and Nuntiatoria has never argued that it is. What the scandal does reveal is another mechanism directly relevant to the present argument: institutions becoming reluctant to investigate ethnic, cultural or religious dimensions of serious misconduct because candour itself has been politicised as prejudice.
In Unequal Reckonings: Clerical Abuse, Grooming Gangs, and the Politics of Religious Accountability, Nuntiatoria drew a deliberate comparison with the treatment of abuse inside Christian institutions. Catholic clerical abuse rightly produced investigations not merely into individual criminals but into clerical culture, episcopal governance, institutional incentives, secrecy and failures of accountability. Nobody seriously argued that examining those factors constituted anti-Christian hatred. When survivors of grooming gangs have described perpetrators using religiously framed contempt, or when particular local patterns show disproportionate involvement of men from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, the same investigative freedom should apply. That does not prove a theological cause; it establishes a subject for inquiry.¹⁶
Nuntiatoria’s The Rape Gang Inquiry and Courts, Citizens and the Demand for Truth subsequently followed the struggle to secure a genuinely comprehensive examination of decades of organised exploitation and public-authority failure. Baroness Louise Casey’s national audit did not conclude that Islam was the national causal explanation for group-based child sexual exploitation. It did, however, document severe weaknesses in ethnicity data and recognise disproportionate patterns in particular localities which authorities had too often approached hesitantly. The lesson is less simplistic and more important than “Islam caused grooming gangs”: fear of examining culture, ethnicity or religion can itself become a safeguarding failure.¹⁷
The consequence of institutional squeamishness falls most heavily upon people with the least influence. In the grooming-gang scandal they were vulnerable girls whose experiences were sometimes discounted while officials worried about communal consequences and accusations of racism. In Batley it was a teacher. In Wakefield it was a frightened child and his mother. In disputes involving religious marriages it can be Muslim women caught between communal expectations and rights theoretically guaranteed by the civil law. The moral pattern is familiar: authorities convince themselves that avoiding offence is socially prudent until the price of that prudence is being paid by somebody else.
The Bracknell case examined by Nuntiatoria in May supplied another reminder that misplaced communal or personal solidarity can corrode public judgement. The facts there concerned a rape, deliberate concealment of evidence and subsequent political controversy over support for an individual convicted of perverting the course of justice. The case was not a grooming-gang prosecution and should not be described as one. Its relevance lay in the recurrent difficulty of placing the vulnerable victim above loyalty, association or communal pressure.¹⁸
The importance of these distinctions is precisely that they make the argument more credible. Not every controversy involving Muslims has the same cause. Islam cannot be invoked lazily as an all-purpose explanation for crimes committed by Muslims any more than Christianity explains every crime committed by a Christian. But the opposite prohibition is equally irrational. Religion and culture must be investigated where evidence makes them relevant, rather than declared irrelevant in advance because the answer may prove politically awkward.
From Social Pressure to Sectarian Politics
The question becomes still more serious once communal identity begins shaping electoral politics.
Nuntiatoria’s Sectarianism and the Crisis of Candour: Britain’s Slow Drift Toward Bloc Politics examined this development through a series of episodes which, taken individually, could be dismissed as ordinary political rough-and-tumble but which together suggest a more consequential transformation. A Christian activist preaching near East London Mosque was confronted during Ramadan; Leeds councillor Mothin Ali celebrated an electoral victory with “Allahu Akbar” and described it as a victory for Gaza; subsequent campaigning in Gorton and Denton involved demographically differentiated messages, including Gaza-centred appeals and Urdu-language material in Muslim areas; and allegations surrounding “family voting”, while not proof of systemic fraud, added to concerns about the independence of electoral participation in particular communities.¹⁹
None of this means that Muslims should not organise politically. Muslims possess precisely the same democratic rights as everybody else, including the right to vote according to their religious convictions, to form organisations, support candidates and campaign about foreign policy. Catholics have no standing to complain that another religious community takes belief seriously in public life while simultaneously lamenting the secularisation of Christianity.
The difficulty arises when democratic citizenship is increasingly organised as bargaining between religious or ethnic blocs rather than through a common political community. Foreign conflicts become tests of domestic loyalty; parties tailor fundamentally different messages to different communities; political actors emerge whose electoral proposition is explicitly that Muslims should vote as Muslims in order to reward friends and punish enemies. Policy Exchange’s Islamopopulism Part 2 records the growing activity of organisations such as The Muslim Vote and Vote Palestine and the election of a significant number of Muslim independent councillors following the earlier success of several Gaza-focused independents at Westminster.²⁰ Again, political organisation is not itself improper. The question is what happens to civic cohesion when the preferred model becomes communal leverage rather than common citizenship.
Nuntiatoria anticipated that concern in Fractured Allies: the Collapse of Britain’s Islamo-Leftist Experiment. The alliance between progressive parties and Muslim communal politics always contained a contradiction which Gaza temporarily obscured: the progressive Left is increasingly committed to radical positions on sexuality and gender which observant Muslims often reject. Once Muslim political organisation develops sufficient confidence to pursue its own priorities rather than functioning primarily as an adjunct of Labour or the Left, that alliance becomes less stable.²¹ The emergence of independent Muslim political organisation should therefore be understood not merely as an electoral curiosity but as part of a larger transition from integration through existing parties towards self-conscious religious-demographic mobilisation.
The Maccabi Tel Aviv controversy demonstrated another aspect of the same danger. In Police Fabrication and the New Double Standard and the subsequent When the Threat Is Reversed, Nuntiatoria examined a policing decision which excluded Maccabi supporters from Villa Park and the political pressure surrounding it. The controversy mattered because public order appeared to be managed by removing the population judged most likely to be targeted rather than simply ensuring that those threatening disorder were restrained. When members of a vulnerable minority are treated as the administratively inconvenient variable because another group may react badly to their presence, the state has begun rewarding the threat rather than merely controlling it.²²
That principle links the political cases to Batley and Wakefield more closely than may first appear. The common mechanism is anticipatory accommodation of whoever is expected to react most intensely. The teacher disappears because protests may escalate; the mother apologises because her son is threatened; speech about Islam becomes unusually dangerous professionally; spectators are excluded because their presence might provoke disorder; politicians segment messages according to religious demographics because those identities have become electorally decisive. None of this constitutes jihadism. Yet neither is it irrelevant to the wider question of whether Islamic religious and communal norms are acquiring coercive influence within a society increasingly uncertain about its own principles.
Nuntiatoria’s Disestablishing the Church of England: Sectarian Politics and the Constitutional Future of Britain identified the irony. At precisely the moment when parts of British politics advocate removing Christianity’s residual constitutional position on grounds that the country has become too religiously plural for establishment, religion is re-entering politics through increasingly confident Muslim communal mobilisation.²³ Secularisation has not produced the neutral public square promised by its advocates. It has often produced a vacuum into which more coherent identities naturally move.
That is why the question raised in Christian Britain Is Not Anti-Muslim remains so important. Britain does not become hostile to Muslim citizens by remembering that it possesses a Christian inheritance. Muslim persons are owed justice, security and full civil dignity. Islam is nevertheless a religion containing propositions which Christians may analyse, oppose and reject. Confusing criticism of Islam with hatred of Muslims serves neither pluralism nor truth.²⁴
What Meaningful Dialogue Would Actually Require
The Catholic response cannot therefore be another call for “dialogue” without specifying what is to be discussed.
Nostra Aetate urges Christians and Muslims to pursue mutual understanding and to work together for justice, moral welfare, peace and freedom. It also says that Islam “takes pleasure in linking itself” with Abraham. That formulation is more careful than the fashionable claim that Christianity and Islam are simply two of “the three Abrahamic faiths”, as though their relationship to Abraham were theological equivalents within a common creed. The Council acknowledges the Islamic claim and identifies areas in which Christians can recognise religious seriousness; it does not teach that Islam constitutes an equally valid continuation of the covenant fulfilled in Christ.²⁵
St Paul locates the promises to Abraham decisively in Christ: “To Abraham were the promises made and to his seed… which is Christ”, and “if you be Christ’s, then are you the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:16, 29). Islam rejects the Trinity, the divine Sonship of Christ, the Incarnation and the Christian confession of the Crucifixion and Redemption. These are not secondary differences among adherents of one faith. They concern the identity of God, the identity of Jesus Christ and the means of salvation.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made the necessary principle explicit in Dominus Iesus: the equality presupposed by interreligious dialogue concerns the equal personal dignity of the participants, not the equality of their doctrines. Dialogue forms part of evangelising mission; it does not abolish the duty to proclaim Christ or the necessity of conversion.²⁶ A Catholic enters dialogue respecting his Muslim interlocutor as a person while remaining entirely free to believe, and say, that Islam is false where it contradicts revelation. The Muslim enjoys precisely the reciprocal liberty to believe Christianity false. Anything less is not mature religious dialogue but administrative management of disagreement.
Once that principle is recovered, the conversations themselves should become much more serious. British Muslim institutions should be asked whether a Muslim possesses an unconditional civil right to abandon Islam and become Christian; whether apostasy may properly incur earthly punishment; whether Muhammad and the Qur’an may be criticised or satirised without legal sanction; whether English civil law possesses final jurisdiction over every citizen; whether non-Muslims enjoy genuinely equal civic status; and how Islamic scholars answer the scriptural and juridical arguments invoked by jihadists. These questions are not expressions of hatred. They are precisely the questions upon which peaceful coexistence and reciprocal liberty depend.
Muslim leaders should not merely be summoned after each atrocity to condemn the latest murderer. They should be expected to engage the ideas the murderer claimed to believe. Where classical jurisprudence is rejected, explain why. Where texts are contextualised, demonstrate the context. Where jihadists misread Islamic sources, answer the reading. Where traditional teachings on apostasy or blasphemy are judged inapplicable or morally unacceptable today, say so clearly enough that young Muslims hear the answer before an extremist recruiter supplies another one.
In that sense the apparently undiplomatic demand that Muslim communities “get their house in order” is not unreasonable. No serious religion should demand exemption from theological accountability. Catholics have learned this lesson painfully. Clerical abuse could not be answered by announcing that abuse contradicted Catholic doctrine and therefore had nothing to do with the Church. The doctrine did condemn the crimes, but Catholic institutions still had to examine failures of culture, leadership, accountability and discipline. The fact that an evil contradicts a religion’s highest teaching does not remove every responsibility from the religious community in which the evil repeatedly occurs.
Nor should Christians enter these conversations apologetically. Nuntiatoria’s Christian Britain Is Not Anti-Muslim rightly insisted upon the distinction between a person and a creed. The Muslim is our neighbour; Islam is a set of theological and juridical claims. Charity towards the first cannot require intellectual submission to the second. Indeed, pretending that differences do not exist is a peculiar form of disrespect, since it implies that Muslims are incapable of hearing Christian disagreement without social order collapsing.
The World Beyond Terrorism Is Less Safe
The larger anniversary question admits an even less comforting answer. Uppsala University’s Conflict Data Program recorded sixty-five armed conflicts involving states during 2025, the highest number since systematic records began in 1946. Eight were interstate conflicts, itself a record for the dataset, while approximately 244,600 people were killed in organised violence during the year.²⁷
The Global Peace Index 2026 reaches the same conclusion by a different route. Global peacefulness has deteriorated for twelve consecutive years; ninety-nine countries worsened in the latest assessment, and the report identifies the erosion of the post-Cold-War order, diffusion of conflicts across borders and rapidly expanding technologies of warfare among the structural drivers.²⁸ The world of 2001 was far from tranquil, but it had not yet experienced the Iraq War, the Syrian catastrophe, Islamic State’s caliphate, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the renewed wars of the Middle East, the explosive proliferation of drone warfare or the present intensity of great-power rivalry.
There is therefore an irony at the heart of this anniversary. We became considerably better at preventing men carrying box-cutters from commandeering commercial aircraft while the wider international environment became considerably less peaceful. Terrorism itself increasingly flourishes where states are weak and conflicts prolonged, which helps explain the movement of jihadist violence towards the Sahel and other unstable theatres. The security architecture constructed after 9/11 solved important problems. History supplied new ones.
The War on Terror consequently deserves neither hagiography nor easy dismissal. Al-Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary was destroyed, its leadership degraded, terrorist finance pursued, intelligence co-operation revolutionised and innumerable plots disrupted. Those achievements almost certainly saved many thousands of lives. Yet Iraq had not organised 9/11, the intelligence case surrounding weapons of mass destruction failed catastrophically, Afghanistan returned to Taliban rule in 2021 and emergency powers created difficult moral and constitutional precedents. Catholic moral theology supplies a better principle than either permanent emergency or pacifism: authority has a real duty to protect the innocent, while neither fear nor expediency suspends the moral law.
John Paul II expressed the balance immediately after 9/11. There is a right of defence against terrorism, but targets and means remain subject to moral and legal limits, and guilt remains personal.² That teaching does not require political naïveté. It simply refuses the terrorist’s own error of believing that the perceived righteousness of a cause converts every useful means into a permissible one.
The Catholic Answer Is Not Managed Decline
The Catholic response must finally move beyond security analysis, because the long-term future of Christianity in Britain will not be determined primarily by whether Muslims become more liberal. It will be determined by whether Christians become Christian again.
Europe’s demographic and religious transformation was already far advanced before contemporary anxiety about Islam became politically respectable. Christians married less, divorced more, contracepted, had fewer children, abandoned regular worship and increasingly failed to transmit the Faith to those children they did have. Catholic schools retained institutional prestige while too often weakening catechesis; Catholic families absorbed the same individualist assumptions as the surrounding culture; vocations collapsed; parishes aged; and public Christianity retreated from confident assertion into heritage language and occasional moral commentary. None of this was imposed by Muslims.
Nuntiatoria’s repeated treatment of Britain’s demographic winter has made the point that population is never merely arithmetic. A civilisation which cannot transmit itself biologically, culturally and spiritually eventually becomes something else. But the Catholic answer is not a breeding competition with Islam. Christianity is not racial, and children must never be regarded as demographic ammunition. A secular Englishman whose grandparents happened to be Catholic contributes less to Catholic renewal than a Muslim who receives Baptism, enters sacramental life and raises a Catholic family.
St John Paul II’s judgement that “the future of humanity passes by way of the family” is particularly apt because family renewal concerns much more than numbers. At York in 1982 he told British families that peace itself requires trust, that trust is born of love, and that love comes to birth in the family.²⁹ Catholic homes form people capable of sacrifice, permanence, duty, forgiveness, intergenerational responsibility and care for those who cannot repay them. A society containing many such families possesses moral reserves which cannot be manufactured by government programme.
If Catholics are concerned about the future religious character of Britain, the first question should therefore not be how many Muslims will live here in fifty years. It should be how many Catholics living here today are creating the Catholics who will inhabit that future. Are young Catholics marrying? Are their marriages lasting? Are they open to children? Are those children baptised, catechised and brought regularly to Mass? Do families pray together? Do Catholic schools produce Catholics? Are parishes making converts? Are seminaries and religious houses receiving vocations? Are Catholics building institutions sufficiently substantial for another generation to inherit?
Those questions are uncomfortable because they remove the consolation of blaming somebody else. Muslim confidence did not make Catholics embarrassed by evangelisation. Islam did not empty Catholic confessionals or persuade Catholic couples to adopt the contraceptive mentality. Muslim parents who deliberately transmit their religion to their children should prompt Catholics to examine why so many Catholic parents do not do the same, rather than simply resenting the consequences.
Evangelisation belongs at the centre of the response. Nuntiatoria has previously argued that hospitality which provides every temporal good while withholding Christ because proclamation might be awkward is not an adequate Christian conception of charity. If Jesus Christ is God incarnate and the Saviour of mankind, inviting a Muslim to become Christian is not an act of aggression towards him. It is what belief in the Gospel logically entails.
The goal, therefore, is not to outbreed Islam but to convert society. A Catholic family of six whose children all abandon the Faith enlarges a demographic category without necessarily restoring Catholic civilisation. A Muslim who encounters Christ, accepts Baptism, marries in the Church, brings children to the font and helps others convert strengthens the Church more fundamentally than inherited ethnicity ever could. Catholic demography and Catholic mission cannot finally be separated.
This is where contemporary interreligious dialogue has so often lost the plot. The objective cannot be the indefinite management of a post-Christian society in which confident Islam expands while Catholicism shrinks politely and bishops congratulate themselves on maintaining cordial relations. Genuine dialogue should secure peace, protect persons, clarify disagreements and defend reciprocal freedom precisely so that truth can be spoken freely. It should not quietly assume that conversion is an embarrassing relic of a less enlightened age.
The Catholic programme is therefore neither hostility towards Muslims nor resignation before Islam. Muslim citizens should be defended from violence and unjust discrimination. They should possess the same rights before the civil law as everyone else. Those rights include the right of Muslims themselves to criticise Islam, leave Islam and become Christians. Islam, meanwhile, must remain subject to theological, moral, historical and political criticism like every other system of ideas.
Britain must also recover confidence in the principle of a common civic order. Nuntiatoria’s work on sharia, grooming-gang failures, sectarian electoral mobilisation, the Maccabi controversy, blasphemy pressures and the Government’s anti-Muslim-hostility definition points repeatedly towards the same danger: a state which fears candidly applying common principles eventually creates precisely the resentment it hoped to avoid. Different groups begin suspecting that law, speech and public order operate according to the anticipated reaction of whichever constituency possesses the greatest capacity for outrage. That is fertile ground for sectarianism.
Catholic social teaching provides a better path. The political community exists for the common good, not as an arbitration service among permanently antagonistic identity blocs. Religious liberty protects conscience without abolishing truth. Charity commands love of neighbour without demanding intellectual dishonesty. The family creates social continuity without becoming an instrument of racial politics. Evangelisation offers conversion without coercion. Legitimate authority defends the innocent without making guilt collective.
At Ground Zero today the names of the dead will again be read aloud. That is fitting, because the victims must not be reduced to scenery for an argument about Islam, immigration or Western decline. Yet honouring them truthfully also means remembering why they were murdered. The attackers were not animated by “senseless violence” in the sense that they possessed no ideas. They believed propositions, invoked religious authority and intended their deaths to advance a religious-political vision.
Twenty-five years later the organisation which planned the attack is weaker, but the phenomenon which produced it has proved adaptable. It has moved across continents, developed new organisational forms and exploited technologies which did not exist when the Twin Towers stood. In Britain, meanwhile, the wider question cannot be confined to whether another nineteen men are preparing to hijack aircraft. It includes whether a schoolteacher may return openly to normal life after displaying an image of Muhammad, whether a frightened mother should ever feel compelled to seek communal forgiveness because her son damaged a Qur’an, whether criticism of Islam can occur without unusual professional risk, whether civil law remains unquestionably supreme, whether vulnerable girls are protected before institutional reputations, and whether electoral politics is becoming organised increasingly through competing communal blocs.
To insist that none of these things can possibly reflect anything about Islam simply because most Muslims are peaceful has become untenable. Peaceful adherence does not make the doctrines, jurisprudence, social norms and communal expectations of a religion analytically irrelevant. Equally, identifying those influences does not convert peaceful Muslims into criminals. A mature society ought to be capable of holding both propositions without hysteria.
That maturity is precisely what meaningful dialogue now requires. Catholics should tell Muslim interlocutors that jihadist violence is not a mysterious external parasite with no relationship to the religious civilisation from which it repeatedly arises. Muslim scholars should be challenged to answer the theology of the jihadist, the coercive tradition surrounding apostasy and blasphemy, the relationship of sharia to civil law and the conditions of genuine reciprocal religious liberty. Catholics, for our part, should enter the conversation without the pretence that Christianity and Islam are essentially two equivalent “Abrahamic faiths” differentiated chiefly by devotional style.
Then we should go home and put our own house in order.
If Christian influence in Britain is declining, Christians must rebuild it. That means marriages entered seriously and kept faithfully, children welcomed rather than feared, homes in which prayer and doctrine return to ordinary life, parishes which form rather than merely service congregations, schools which remember why they were founded, vocations encouraged, converts sought and institutions created which can carry Christian conviction into another generation.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, we are better defended against the attack which happened. We are not obviously living in a safer world. Nor can Britain plausibly claim to have resolved the religious questions exposed that morning while some of the most elementary questions about Islam, coercion, integration and reciprocal liberty remain subjects our institutions approach with extraordinary nervousness.
The Catholic answer is not panic, hatred or denial. It is to tell the truth about the danger, defend the innocent without collective blame, demand intellectual and civic reciprocity, proclaim Jesus Christ without apology and rebuild a Catholic culture capable of surviving because Catholics themselves believe strongly enough to transmit it.
If Britain is to become more Christian, Christians will have to make it so. That work will not begin in a counter-terrorism office, an interfaith reception or a demographic spreadsheet. It will begin where Catholic civilisation has always begun: at the altar, at the baptismal font, in the confessional, in the school and around the family hearth.
¹ National September 11 Memorial & Museum, “9/11 FAQs”.
² Pope St John Paul II, General Audience, 12 September 2001; Pope St John Paul II, “No Peace Without Justice, No Justice Without Forgiveness,” Message for the World Day of Peace 2002.
³ Transportation Security Administration, “Aviation Security: Then and Now”.
⁴ Reuters, “What’s happened to al Qaeda in the 25 years since 9/11?”, 10 September 2026.
⁵ United Nations Security Council Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, S/2026/44, 3 February 2026.
⁶ Institute for Economics & Peace, Global Terrorism Index 2026.
⁷ Europol, European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2026, 13 July 2026.
⁸ MI5, “UK National Terrorism Threat Level Raised To SEVERE”, 1 May 2026.
⁹ Nuntiatoria, “A Religion of Peace? Imam Adam Kelwick’s Rhetoric and the Realities of Islamic Doctrine”, 22 July 2025; Nuntiatoria, “Bondi Beach and the Refusal to Name Islamist Terror”, 18 December 2025.
¹⁰ Channel 4/ICM, “What British Muslims Really Think”, published 11 April 2016.
¹¹ J.L. Partners/Henry Jackson Society, British Muslim and General Public Attitudes Polling, March 2024; Policy Exchange, Understanding Islamopopulism: Views of Concern, 4 May 2026.
¹² Nuntiatoria, “Preferential Treatment or Public Principle? The Question Schools Must Answer”, 18 March 2026.
¹³ Nuntiatoria, “England’s Free Speech Test: the Coskun Case and the Return of Blasphemy by Prosecutorial Means”, 13 February 2026; Nuntiatoria, “The State Erased the Case File: Blasphemy Law by Stealth”, 21 August 2026.
¹⁴ Nuntiatoria, “Soft Blasphemy: The RAF Cadet Case and the Unofficial Policing of Thought in Britain”, 22 April 2026.
¹⁵ Nuntiatoria, “One Law for All: Sharia and the Challenge to British Democracy”, 22 September 2025.
¹⁶ Nuntiatoria, “Unequal Reckonings: Clerical Abuse, Grooming Gangs, and the Politics of Religious Accountability”, 13 February 2026.
¹⁷ Nuntiatoria, “The Rape Gang Inquiry: A Public-Funded Probe into Decade-Spanning Abuse Failures”, 6 February 2026; Nuntiatoria, “Courts, Citizens, and the Demand for Truth: Three Fronts in Britain’s Grooming Gangs Reckoning”, 5 March 2026.
¹⁸ Nuntiatoria, “Bracknell: Rape, Obstruction, and the Moral Failure of Public Authority”, 1 May 2026.
¹⁹ Nuntiatoria, “Sectarianism and the Crisis of Candour: Britain’s Slow Drift Toward Bloc Politics”, 27 February 2026.
²⁰ Policy Exchange, “Islamopopulism Part 2: The Muslim Vote, Vote Palestine and Muslim Independents in Their Own Words”, 10 May 2026.
²¹ Nuntiatoria, “Fractured Allies: the Collapse of Britain’s Islamo-Leftist Experiment”, 12 December 2025.
²² Nuntiatoria, “Police Fabrication and the New Double Standard: The Maccabi Ban, Sectarian Politics, and the Moral Collapse of British Institutions”, 23 November 2025; Nuntiatoria, “When the Threat Is Reversed: Policing, Political Pressure, and the Collapse of Moral Judgment”, 9 January 2026.
²³ Nuntiatoria, “Disestablishing the Church of England: Sectarian Politics and the Constitutional Future of Britain”, 16 March 2026.
²⁴ Nuntiatoria, “Christian Britain Is Not Anti-Muslim: Rowan Williams, Nigel Farage and the Increasingly Dangerous Confusion Between Christian Identity and Hostility to Islam”, 21 August 2026.
²⁵ Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, §§2–3, 28 October 1965.
²⁶ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, §22, 6 August 2000.
²⁷ Uppsala Conflict Data Program, “UCDP: Record Number of Conflicts Between States”, 9 June 2026.
²⁸ Institute for Economics & Peace, Global Peace Index 2026.
²⁹ Pope St John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, §86, 22 November 1981; Pope St John Paul II, Homily at the Mass for Families, York, 31 May 1982.
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