Key points
- Advocacy report (Christian Concern, a British evangelical organisation) signed by Mark Durie, a theologian and Anglican minister, who argues that Islam constitutes one influencing factor - though not the only one - in the grooming gangs phenomenon.
- Main thesis: the religious correlation (Muslim names in the majority of recorded convictions) is said to be stronger than the ethnic correlation, which is masked by the "Asian" label.
- The author identifies eight aspects of Islamic theology and law liable to create favourable conditions, while acknowledging that the gangs' "street Islam" does not conform to sharia.
- Eleven recommendations, including the recording of religious identities, the refusal of an official definition of "Islamophobia", and a ban on unregistered religious marriages.
1. Presentation of the document and its publisher
- Author. Mark Durie - linguist, theologian and Anglican minister; Senior Research Fellow at the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam (Melbourne School of Theology). Author of The Third Choice and Liberty to the Captives.
- Publisher. Christian Concern (the trading name of CCFON Ltd), an evangelical Christian legal and political advocacy organisation, London.
- Nature. Analytical essay in religious studies, ~32 pages (2025), accompanied by a distributable executive summary.
- Subject. To examine the hypothesis of a contribution of Islamic theology and law to the British grooming gangs phenomenon (organised networks for the sexual exploitation of underage girls).
- Context. Published in the wake of the Casey Review (2025) and the blocking of the national inquiry announced in 2025, against the backdrop of a controversy reignited in January 2025 (E. Musk v. K. Starmer).
2. Methodology
- Approach. "Prima facie" reasoning based on secondary sources; no original empirical investigation.
- Institutional sources. Casey Review (2025), Jay report (2014), Home Office statistics, Forced Marriage Unit, 2021 census data.
- Testimonies. Rotherham survivors ("Ella Hill", a pseudonym), the "Sarah" and "Anna" cases (Christian Legal Centre).
- Journalistic corpus. Andrew Norfolk (The Times), Charlie Peters (GB News), Peter McLoughlin (Easy Meat).
- Doctrinal sources. Qur'an, hadith, the Shafiʿi fiqh manual Reliance of the Traveller, fatwas, contemporary authorities (al-Fawzān, International Islamic Fiqh Academy).
- Conceptual tools. The distinction between Islam and "Islamicate" (M. Hodgson); "street Islam" (Norfolk, Hargey); the thesis of the "religious illiteracy" of secularised societies.
- Stated limitation. The author explicitly acknowledges the absence of systematic data on the religious affiliation of both perpetrators and victims.
3. Central thesis
Durie starts from an observation: when the grooming gangs are discussed, the perpetrators' ethnic origin is almost always mentioned - they are said to be "Asian" or "Pakistani" - but their religion is hardly ever mentioned. He holds, on the contrary, that affiliation to Islam accounts better for these crimes than ethnic origin, and he writes that religion has with them "a stronger correlation than ethnicity". The author nonetheless qualifies his argument on two points. He first recalls that Islam in no way commands these rapes, since sharia condemns them: they fall under zinā, fornication, punishable by a hundred lashes or by stoning. He then stresses that the mechanisms he describes are not specific to Islam. His thesis is therefore stated as follows: he does not argue that religion commands the crime, but that eight elements of Muslim doctrine and law form a favourable terrain, which the gangs then take up in a degraded form - what the journalist Andrew Norfolk called a "street Islam".
4. Argumentative architecture
The religious dimension excluded from the debate → converging indications (names, testimonies, foreign comparisons) → eight doctrinal drivers → taken up by "street Islam" → eleven recommendations
A. The religious rather than ethnic variable
What is demonstrated. For Durie, religion describes the perpetrators better than ethnic origin, and the "Asian" label is misleading: Asian Hindus, Sikhs and Christians do not appear among the perpetrators, but only among the victims.
The data. Of the convictions recorded from 1997 to 2018, Peter McLoughlin finds 87 % Muslim names. In the Casey Review (2025), the word "ethnicity" appears 222 times, "religion" 5 times, and "Islam" only once. When Keir Starmer refers to "Asian grooming gangs", the Hindu Council protests against this "whitewash". Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, concludes: "what the perpetrators have in common is their professed faith".
Analysis. To understand the author's reasoning, one must follow it in two stages. He first proposes looking at the perpetrators' religion rather than their origin. His argument is as follows: the United Kingdom is also home to many Hindu Indians, Sikhs and East Asians, who are not found among the guilty parties. What the perpetrators have in common is therefore not being "Asian" but being Muslim. To support this observation, he recalls that most of those convicted bear a Muslim name and that the official report (Casey) speaks of ethnicity 222 times but of religion only 5 times. One simple question remains: a surname indicates where a person comes from, not whether they are a believer or why they acted as they did. To know whether it is really religion that is at work - rather than, say, a family network or the lure of money - one would need figures that no one collects today. That is why the report ends by calling for these figures.
B. The religious marker in the testimonies
What is demonstrated. Some perpetrators justified their rapes with religious arguments, scorning the "kuffar" (the non-Muslims) and regarding white girls as "licit".
The data. The report draws on the Rotherham survivor "Ella Hill" (a pseudonym), who testified before the Jay inquiry in 2022. She sums up her abusers' logic: "White girls are seen as easy meat" - white girls are seen as "easy meat", while Muslim girls are "strictly controlled". In the "Sarah" case, the abuser presents her with a mosque marriage certificate, "divorces" her by repeating the formula three times, then forcibly marries her to another man in a ceremony performed by an imam.
Analysis. Here the author relies on the words of the victims themselves. A Rotherham survivor, whom he calls "Ella Hill", told the official inquiry that her abusers called white girls "easy meat" and regarded Muslim girls as "protected". In other words, they used religion to justify what they were doing. This shows that the crime was not merely a matter of opportunity: it was accompanied by a religious discourse. And since victims from different towns recount very similar things, it is not an isolated case. These testimonies prove that this discourse exists and that it recurs; they do not, however, indicate how frequently it appears everywhere, since it has not been counted.
C. The eight theological-juridical drivers
What is demonstrated. Eight doctrines together are said to form a "framework of moral plausibility" favourable to abuse: the superiority of the Muslim, loyalty and disavowal (al-walāʼ wa-l-barāʼ, "to love and to hate for God"), the domination of men over women, the seclusion of women, forced marriage with no minimum age, the fear of female sexuality (fitna), wartime slavery, and dhimmitude.
The data. Durie cites the Qur'an (3:110, 4:34), hadiths and a Shafiʿi law manual, the Reliance of the Traveller. He recalls, for example, that the Arabic word nikāḥ denotes both "marriage" and "sexual intercourse", and that classical fiqh sets no minimum age for marriage. Imam Taj Hargey, in Oxford, speaks of a "theological populism" fed by fundamentalist preachers, while Norfolk refers to a "distorted street Islam".
Analysis. The author is a theologian: he reads the religious texts (the Qur'an, the hadiths, the manuals of Muslim law) and asks what they make possible. His idea is that these texts command no one to rape, but that they create a climate in which it may appear permitted. He carefully distinguishes three things: religion as it is written, the culture it has shaped, and the gangs' distorted "street Islam". He lists eight ideas - for example the superiority of the Muslim, the domination of men over women, or the absence of a minimum age for marriage - and explains that it is the combination of them, placed end to end, that would form this favourable climate. He finally specifies what his demonstration does and does not do: it shows what the texts make possible, but leaves to future research the task of verifying whether, and to what extent, this actually acts upon people.
D. Transnational generalisation
What is demonstrated. According to the author, the same pattern - the targeting of non-Muslim girls - is said to be found beyond the United Kingdom, both in countries of immigration and in Muslim-majority countries.
The data. In Pakistan, the BBC (2021) estimates at around 1,000 a year the Christian, Hindu or Sikh girls who are abducted, forcibly converted and married; the UN voiced alarm about this in 2024. In Egypt, Coptic reports describe the abduction of young Christian women, sometimes with the cross tattooed on their wrist burned off with acid. In the Netherlands, the "lover boys" phenomenon; in Australia (2002), a gang convicted of gang rapes.
Analysis. The author shows that the same thing occurs elsewhere: in Pakistan and Egypt, young Christian, Hindu or Sikh women are abducted, forcibly converted and married; in Iraq, Yazidi women were captured by the Islamic State. For him, what links these cases is not chance but religious law, and he explains it as a theologian. He invokes the idea that non-Muslims are tolerated but inferior (the dhimma), the rule that a non-Muslim cannot be the guardian of a Muslim, the rule that a woman's conversion annuls her marriage, and the laws of war that permit the taking of captives. In his view, it is therefore the same religious framework that reappears from one country to another. These situations nonetheless remain very different - a war, a Muslim country, immigration - and what brings them together is the religious rule, not the context. The author himself adds that he lacks reliable data to make this a single explanation.
5. The author's conclusions
- For Durie, Islam is said to be "implicated" in the phenomenon without being its sole cause; he holds that more thorough research remains necessary, but that action cannot wait for its results.
- Secularised societies are said to have lost the capacity to perceive the influence of religions on cultures, "for better and for worse", and should therefore relearn how to talk about it.
- Durie devotes a section to "evasions". For example: in 2018, a minister told the House of Lords that "there is nothing in the Qur'an that encourages" these acts, and cited the hadith "paradise lies beneath the feet of the mother". Durie objects that this hadith comes from the "Book of Jihad" and merely permits a man to remain with his mother rather than going off to fight: it says nothing about women in general.
- Eleven recommendations. The main ones: record and publish the religion of perpetrators and victims; train the police on religious motives; do not adopt an official definition of "Islamophobia"; ban unregistered religious marriages; recognise the Muslims who reject this "culture"; ask the Forced Marriage Unit to remove from its website the claim that forced marriage has no religious basis, and to resume collecting data on the religion of perpetrators and victims.
- Final question: will the crisis prove to be a milestone in the "Islamisation" of the United Kingdom, or a reawakening that brings the country back to its roots?
Florence Bergeaud-Blackler
Anthropologist, Research Fellow at the CNRS (HDR)
Founding President of CERIF - European Centre for Research and Information on Brotherhoodism
cerif.eu