UK art show explores Muslim life, Europe’s Islamic history and Islamophobia

London, United Kingdom – Underneath a 536-year-old Islamic-inspired Spanish roof in east London hang three tapestries linking the city’s Muslim communities to Europe’s longstanding Muslim histories.

Among the works by artist Shahed Saleem, signs from the British Home Office’s 2013 “Hostile Environment” policy, urging undocumented immigrants to self-deport, are depicted along with images of Muslim shoppers in London’s diverse Queen’s Market and a portrait of Altab Ali, a young Bangladeshi man who was murdered in a city park in a racially motivated attack.

The collection, entitled I Was Born Here, is “a story of migration and of belonging”, said Saleem, who is also an architect, author and academic.

Sitting on pillows beneath the ceiling, he invited onlookers to view and discuss his exhibition.

Saleem contextualised the works against rising xenophobia, seen recently during the election wins of Reform UK, an anti-immigrant party, and racist riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

“While I was making the work, I was seeing the increasing racial politics, the hateful climate against … basically all people that represented migration and processes of immigration,” Saleem told Al Jazeera.

‘The themes remain alive’

He was approached by the Victoria and Albert Museum team in 2024 to create an exhibit for their new Stratford location, the V&A East Storehouse, which responded to the local community and culture, and to the Torrijos ceiling. The elaborate carved and gilded wooden ceiling, which measures 6 by 6 metres (20 x 20 feet), originated from a palace in the central Spanish town of Torrijos.

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What followed was hundreds of hours of building three enormous tapestries.

The first, named Home Office, depicts verbatim quotes from government signage displayed through diverse neighbourhoods in London. Back in 2013, intimidation tactics were evident in the language used: “106 ARRESTS LAST WEEK IN YOUR AREA”, “In the UK Illegally?” and “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST”. They are now woven on the fabric, against a backdrop of Alhambra patterns – Islamic geometric art rooted in medieval Spain.

A panelled tapestry, Altab Ali’s portrait, honours the textile worker who was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack in 1978, when he was just 24.

There is also an image of the voyage of the Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus’s vehicle, funded by the Spanish monarchy, marking the beginning of Spain’s colonisation of the so-called “New World” in 1492.

In the 1400s, despite centuries of religious plurality throughout Spain, the Spanish Inquisition began violently targeting Jewish and Muslim communities.

“While this period is often celebrated as the dawn of Spain’s Golden Age, it also ushered in one of Europe’s most devastating programmes of religious and ethnic homogenisation,” said Tharik Hussain, historian, travel writer and author of Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History.

“Over the century that followed, and in those leading up to it, hundreds of thousands of European Muslims and Jews were forced into exile, compelled to convert or driven from their homes, while countless others endured persecution, imprisonment and death in an attempt to erase entire communities that had been indigenous to the peninsula for centuries.”

He said throughout history, “Christian Europe” has admired and at times preserved and celebrated the “artistic achievements of Europe’s Islamic civilisation”, but too often has marginalised, excluded and persecuted Muslim communities.

Reflecting on the exhibit, 26-year-old visitor Hana said, “Although the stories were rooted in the past, you can see that the themes remain alive in today’s public.

“There was something particularly ironic about [the roof] being presented alongside the tapestry’s representation of hostility and the uncomfortable realities of migration.”

She said the irony is in Europe’s longstanding fascination and orientalisation of Islamic art and people, alongside increasing Islamophobia. In the past year alone, Islamic art has sold for record-setting amounts in London’s auction houses, while anti-Muslim crimes terrorise communities.

For Saleem, histories are intentionally interwoven.

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“Colonisation abroad and the creation of ethno-nationalism at home, these two components became constituent parts of the Modern European nation, which continues today,” he said.

Elsewhere in the exhibit, The Bell Hotel and the Britannia Hotel, both of which have been used to host asylum seekers, are depicted on a coat of arms. Last July, hundreds of far-right protesters attempted to storm The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, at least three of whom were found guilty of violent disorder this month.

Another tapestry is lively. A crowd of market-goers bustles throughout Newham’s Queen’s Market, an iconic publicly owned market that locals have recently fought to protect against corporate development.

“I felt that these are the people who are being very largely impacted by legislation and timing that we’re seeing,” Saleem told Al Jazeera. “But they also represent a multicultural [Britain] and a process of arriving, settling, creativity, labour and life, really. This piece shows the richness of the city which is threatened.”

I was born here: A defensive statement in the face of hostility

For Imran Haque, 25, the exhibit is more than just an artistic and political commentary – it speaks to him and his family’s personal histories.

“I Was Born Here manifests the very real, tangible and honest truth that I, and thousands more British Muslims, were, in fact, born here,” he told Al Jazeera. In the 1970s, Haque’s mother and her friends, as young Bangladeshi newcomers to London, shopped for fabrics at the very same marketplace that Saleem sourced his textiles from.

Underpinning Saleem’s work is an undermining of ethnonationalist thinking that positions Muslim immigrants as foreign and non-British.

The histories of the Alhambra and the roof itself nod to Islam’s place in Europe for centuries, while the title of the exhibit, I Was Born Here, satirises a common phrase that Muslim and non-white Londoners are often forced to repeat.

“It’s something that we would have to use to justify our existence here, in England, to counter racist attacks,” Saleem explained to Al Jazeera. “It’s part [of] a parody of having to continuously claim one’s space in the palace where you actually belong.”

The works are the first thing the eye catches when entering the first floor of the Storehouse, taking up an enormous amount of space with its bright colours and sheer size.

This significance is not lost on onlookers like Haque, who said its prominence in the gallery “has allowed me to feel free to occupy space with my history and story”.

“Muslims are not a strange or foreign concept,” he said. “The religion has been known on these shores from the 16th century, and the pieces serve as a reminder that faith has no borders.”

I Was Born Here, to Saleem, is not just a political commentary or a series of artworks – it is an artefact. “We’re in a historical moment at this point in time so the work acts as a marker of that moment, as well,” says Saleem, viewing the works as documenting an unprecedented wave of Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment, and a historical revisionism that positions Europe as solely Christian. “When you come back and read the work in 100 years’ time, it will speak of all these things.”

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