There is something strange about watching a British debate about Islam in 2026 from a Danish perspective. Not because the subject is irrelevant. Quite the contrary. But because almost every argument sounds so familiar.
On 17 June, the venerable Oxford Union hosted a debate on the motion This House Believes the West is Right to be Suspicious of Islam. On one side were Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox and British-Israeli journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti. On the other were former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, Muslim debater Abdullah al-Andalusi and podcaster Michael Doward.
What followed was two and a half hours of discussion about the Quran, the hadiths, jihad, terrorism, tolerance, women’s rights and, of course, the by now well-worn insistence that those Quranic verses and hadiths that do not look particularly attractive to modern Western eyes must be read in their proper context.
For a Dane who has followed the debate about Islam and freedom of speech since the Muhammad cartoons crisis, there was something distinctly been there, done that about it all. The cartoons crisis was Denmark’s brutal crash course in the encounter between Islam and Western freedom of speech, forcing us to confront a debate that, despite Britain’s massive problems with Islam, the British apparently still find themselves having twenty years later.
The most interesting thing, then, was not what was being said inside the Oxford Union, but what was happening around it.
The Debate That Almost Didn’t Happen
The invitation to Tommy Robinson in particular had provoked fierce protests. On the night itself, hundreds of demonstrators from groups including Stand Up to Racism and a number of left-wing and pro-Palestinian organisations gathered around the Oxford Union, prompting shops and pubs to close early and the police to cordon off streets and mount a major security operation.
And not without reason: a spokesman for Oxford Stand Up to Racism told the student newspaper Cherwell quite explicitly that sheer numbers of protesters could “prevent this horrible debate”.
And that is precisely what they tried to do: outside, self-styled anti-fascists physically attempted to prevent a debate from taking place – while inside, the question under discussion was whether the West was right to be suspicious of Islam.
The paradox became even more striking when, during the debate, Oxford Union President Arwa Elrayess made a point of telling Robinson that he was only able to sit there and speak because of the extensive security measures protecting him.
That was indisputable.
But as an argument against Robinson, it was a spectacular own goal.
The question practically asked itself:
Protected from whom?
It was not Robinson’s supporters from whom the police had to protect his opponents. On the contrary, it was Robinson and the event itself that had to be protected from people on the side Elrayess herself represented in the debate – the protesters outside who were trying to prevent him from being heard at all.
Elrayess thus inadvertently provided yet another illustration of the evening’s paradox: she used the need to protect a critic of Islam as an argument against the critic of Islam, even though that protection was necessary because of his opponents.
It is an expression of the now familiar alliance of convenience between Islamist interests and sections of the Western left, which have made the fight against criticism of Islam their own. Criticism of Islam is redefined as racism, the critic becomes the problem, and attempts to prevent him from speaking can then be presented as anti-fascism.
That evening, the mechanism became almost physically visible outside the Oxford Union.
The Brown Envelope
Inside the chamber, Laurence Fox provided perhaps the evening’s most elegant demonstration of the same problem.
Towards the end of his speech, he produced a brown envelope. He had just been talking about opposition among British Muslims to the publication of images of Muhammad and had declared that the West should resist Islam on free-speech grounds alone.
There was a cartoon inside the envelope, he said. His wife had asked him not to show it for fear of the consequences for their family, but if fear made him refrain from doing so, he had already submitted.
“I will not submit,” he proclaimed, and began opening the envelope.
No one knew what it contained, but the reaction in the chamber left little doubt about what many feared. Oxford Union’s Muslim president, Arwa Elrayess, immediately rose to protest: was the fact that she, as a Muslim president, had invited Fox to make his arguments not itself proof of her belief in free speech?
Jacob Rees-Mogg rose in support of Elrayess, offering a rather more British way out: were props even permitted in the Oxford Union?
They were.
Fox opened the envelope – and produced a cartoon of Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The chamber erupted in laughter – and the relief that swept through the room was almost palpable.
That was the point.
Fox did not need to show a Muhammad cartoon to demonstrate its power: the Oxford Union did it for him.
Rees-Mogg’s Blind Spot
Most fascinating of all, however, was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who, despite his deeply conservative outlook, had placed himself on the side rejecting the proposition that the West had particular reason to be wary of Islam.
Rees-Mogg is no progressive relativist who believes that all cultures are equally good, nor did he spend his speech singing the praises of Islam. Quite the contrary. He delivered a passionate defence of Western civilisation:
“Our values work,” he said.
They had created prosperity, the rule of law and freedom of religion. Most Islamic countries, by contrast, had “corrupt and bad governments”, while the more successful among them had begun to copy the West.
And then he explained why: “The reason the West is strong is because of Christ, and because of the resurrection.”
Christianity, according to Rees-Mogg, was the very foundation of Western values. In doing so, he himself established the crucial premise: religions shape civilisations, values have consequences, and different values create different societies.
Yet he called it “misplaced”, “cowardly” and “weak” to argue that the West therefore had particular reason to be wary of Islam.
But if Christianity can shape a civilisation, why should Islam not be able to do the same?
That paradox made Rees-Mogg emblematic of parts of the British establishment: it loves the civilisation it has inherited but cannot imagine that what one loves may also require defending.
And then came the final image of the evening.
Rees-Mogg took a cross from his pocket which, he explained, contained a fragment of the True Cross. A physical relic of the religion he had just identified as the foundation of Western civilisation.
He held it aloft before him and concluded in Latin:
Christus vincit. Christus regnat. Christus imperat.
Christ conquers. Christ reigns. Christ commands.
Rees-Mogg is, of course, theologically entitled to believe that the gates of hell will never prevail against Christianity. But the Oxford Union was not debating whether Christianity would ultimately triumph over Islam. It was debating whether the West had reason to be wary of Islam.
And while Rees-Mogg explained why the answer was no, part of the answer was standing outside the door.
Hundreds of protesters had tried to prevent people from entering a debate. Police were deployed in the streets. Tommy Robinson required extensive security protection. And inside the chamber, Laurence Fox had merely needed to produce a brown envelope for the Oxford Union to reveal which cartoon it feared might be inside.
The Oxford Union voted against the motion.
33 to 30.
But the most interesting argument of the debate was never to be found inside the chamber.
It was standing outside.
