Germany’s Muslim population surpassed six million in 2016 for the first time ever. Germany now vies with France for the highest Muslim population in Western Europe.

The increase in Germany’s Muslim population is being fueled by mass migration. An estimated 300,000 migrants arrived in Germany in 2016, in addition to the more than one million who arrived in 2015. At least 80% (or 800,000 in 2015 and 240,000 in 2016) of the newcomers were Muslim, according to the Central Council of Muslims in Germany.

In addition to the newcomers, the rate of population increase of the Muslim community already living in Germany is around 1.6% per year (or 77,000), according to data extrapolated from a Pew Research Center study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe.

Based on Pew projections, which were proffered before the current migration crisis, the Muslim population of Germany was to have reached an estimated 5,145,000 by the end of 2015.

Adding the 800,000 Muslim migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015, and the 240,000 who arrived in 2016, combined with the 77,000 natural increase, the Muslim population of Germany jumped by 1,117,000, to reach an estimated 6,262,000 by the end of 2016. This amounts to approximately 7.5% of Germany’s overall population of 82 million.

Mass migration from the Muslim world is fast-tracking the Islamization of Germany, as evidenced by the proliferation of no-go zones, Sharia courts, polygamy and child marriages. Mass migration has also been responsible for a host of social disruptions, including jihadist attacks, a migrant rape epidemic, a public health crisis, rising crime and a rush by German citizens to purchase weapons for self-defense — and even to abandon Germany altogether.

What follows is a chronological round-up of some of the key stories about the Islamization of Germany during 2016.

JANUARY 2016

January 1. Mobs of Muslim men of “Arab or North African” origin sexually assaulted hundreds of women in Cologne and other German cities. Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime.” The government and mainstream media were accused of trying to cover up the crimes to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiment.

January 1. The Minister President of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, rejected public concerns about the “alleged Islamization” of Germany. “How should Muslims, who represent a minority, Islamize our society?” he asked. Germans feel insecure, he said, because “people are afraid of strangers they do not know.”

January 3. Bremen Police Union Chairman Jochen Kopelke said that migrants were attacking city police with increasing frequency: “The tone has become extremely aggressive; sometimes the police must apply massive force to get a situation under control.” Bremen Senator Ulrich Mäurer added: “The excesses of violence against police officers show that these people have no respect for our constitutional order and its representatives.”

January 4. A leaked police report revealed chaos “beyond description” in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Women were forced to “run a gauntlet” of drunken men of a “migrant background” to enter and exit the central train station. Police officers were unable to re-establish order. One migrant reprimanded a police officer: “I am Syrian; you have to treat me kindly! Mrs. Merkel invited me.”

January 6. Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said it was “scandalous that it took the mainstream media several days” to report on the sexual assaults in Cologne. He said public media was a “cartel of silence” exercising censorship to protect migrants from accusations of wrongdoing.

January 9. Development Minister Gerd Müller warned that the biggest refugee movements to Europe are still to come. He said that only 10% of the migrants from the chaos in Iraq and Syria have reached Europe so far: “Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.”

January 9. A vigilante group began patrolling the streets of Düsseldorf to “make the city safer for our women.” Similar groups emerged in Cologne and Stuttgart.

January 12. Frank Oesterhelweg, a politician with the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), caused a scandal when he said that police should be authorized to use deadly force to prevent migrants from raping German women. Bild reported that many German police officers are afraid of using lethal force “because of the legal consequences.”

January 17. Berlin clergyman Gottfried Martens accused German politicians and church leaders of ignoring the persecution of Christians by Muslims in German refugee shelters. He said that the Christians were facing “verbal threats, threats with knives, blows to the face, ripped crucifixes, torn Bibles, insults of being an infidel, and denial of access to the kitchen.”

January 18. A 24-year-old migrant from Sudan was released after being held for questioning at a police station in Hanover. After crossing the street, the man, who receives 300 euros ($335) a month in social welfare benefits, dropped his pants, exposed himself in public and shouted, “Who are you? You cannot do anything to me. Whatever I cannot get from the state, I will steal.”

January 20. Migrants invaded female changing rooms and showers at public swimming pools in Leipzig. City officials tried to keep the incidents quiet, but details were leaked to the media.

January 21. More than 200 migrants sued the German government for delays in processing their asylum applications.

January 26. In an

“We have the problem that we are too close to the government. The topics we cover are determined by the government. But many of the topics the government wants to prevent us from reporting about are more important than the topics they want us to cover…

“We must report in such a way that serves Europe and the common good, as it pleases Mrs. Merkel. There are written instructions … today we are not allowed to say anything negative about the refugees. This is government journalism, and this leads to a situation in which the public loses their trust in us. This is scandalous.”

January 28. Politicians in Kiel ordered city police to overlook crimes perpetrated by migrants. Police in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony were also instructed to be lenient to criminal migrants.

January 28. A migrant from Sudan sexually assaulted a female police officer in Hanover as she was attempting to arrest him for theft. “Such brazen behavior towards a police officer has been unheard of until now,” said public prosecutor Thomas Klinge.

January 28. Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, the iconic site of the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49, became the biggest refugee shelter in Germany. Opposition politicians said the government was creating an “immigrant ghetto” in the heart of Berlin.

January 30. A gang of Afghan migrants on a Munich subway attacked two elderly men who tried to stop them from groping a woman. Although they had been denied asylum in Germany four years earlier, they were not deported because Afghanistan is “too dangerous.”

January 31. ISIS sympathizers defaced more than 40 gravestones at a cemetery in Konstanz with slogans such as, “Germans out of Syria,” “Christ is Dead” and “Islamic State.”

The words “I HATE GERMANS” are spray-painted on a gravestone, one of more than 40 vandalized by Islamic State sympathizers at a cemetery in Konstanz, Germany. (Image source: Silvan500 video screenshot)

January 31. In an effort to silence critics of the government’s open door migration policy, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the third-largest party in Germany. The AfD is surging in popularity because of its anti-immigration platform.

FEBRUARY 2016

February 2. A total of 91,671 migrants — an average of around 3,000 migrants each day — entered Germany during the month of January 2016.

February 4. German police arrested four members of a cell allegedly planning jihadist attacks in Berlin. The ringleader — a 35-year-old Algerian who was staying at a refugee shelter in Attendorn with his wife and two children — arrived in Germany posing as an asylum seeker from Syria. He reportedly received military training from the Islamic State.

February 5. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency, revealed that more than 100 Islamic State fighters may be living in Germany as refugees, some of whom are known to have entered the country with fake or stolen passports.

February 8. German police arrested an alleged ISIS commander who was living at a refugee shelter in Sankt Johann. The 32-year-old jihadist, posing as a Syrian asylum seeker, entered Germany in the fall of 2015.

February 16. Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a leaked police report. This figure represented an 80% increase over 2014 and worked out to around 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, between January and December 2015.

The actual number of migrant crimes is far higher, however, because the report included only crimes that have been solved (aufgeklärten Straftaten). Statistics show that only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufklärungsquote). This implies that the actual number of crimes committed by migrants in 2015 exceeded 400,000.

February 16. Police raided the homes of 44 Salafists in Bremen. “It is rather apocalyptic that we have people living in the middle of our city who are prepared, from one day to the next, to participate massively in the terror of the Islamic State,” said Bremen Interior Minister Ulrich Mäurer.

February 25. Afghan asylum seekers assaulted three girls at the Sophienhof shopping mall in Kiel. After posting photographs of the girls on social media, the two men were joined by at least 30 other migrants who began to harass the girls. When police arrived, the migrants verbally and physically abused the officers. Only two of the perpetrators were apprehended.

February 26. A 15-year-old German girl of Moroccan descent stabbed and wounded a police officer at the central train station in Hanover. The stabbing was the first Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack in Germany. “The perpetrator did not display any emotion,” police said. “Her only concern was for her headscarf. Whether the police officer survived, she did not care.”

February 29. German authorities admitted they lost track of some 130,000 migrants who entered the country in 2015. The admission was in response to a parliamentary question from the opposition Left Party. The revelation raised concerns that unaccounted migrants could include jihadists who entered the country posing as refugees.

MARCH 2016

March 1. The Schleswig-Holstein branch of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU announced plans to ensure that pork continues to be available at public canteens, child daycare centers and schools across the north German state. CDU politician Daniel Günther complained that canteens, nurseries and schools are removing pork from their menu in order not to offend Muslims. “The consumption of pork belongs to our culture,” he said. “No one should be obliged to do so. But we also don’t want the majority having to refrain from pork.”

March 3. The Arriba water park in Norderstedt, one of the largest such parks in Germany, announced that males and females would be segregated after two Afghan migrants raped a 14-year-old girl at the facility.

March 4. A court in Düsseldorf sentenced Nils Donath, a 25-year-old German national, to four-and-a-half years in prison for joining the Islamic State. The court heard how Donath, a convert to Islam, received weapons training and learned how to build bombs — and how he volunteered to carry out jihadist attacks in Europe.

March 7. Police in Cologne arrested a 25-year-old German national, Shahid Ilgar Oclu S, on charges of being a member of the Islamic State.

March 24. Following a wave of sexual assaults by migrants, the Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn, a railway in central Germany, announced plans to install women-only compartments.

March 31. The German Ministry for Families designated €200 million to fight the sexual abuse of women and children in refugee shelters.

APRIL 2016

April 3. Two migrants from Afghanistan were arrested for forcing a 14-year-old boy to perform sex acts on them at a public swimming pool in Delbrück.

April 10. A 26-year-old Syrian migrant admitted to setting fire to a migrant shelter in Bingen. He also admitted to painting swastikas outside the building in order to make it look as though the fire was set by anti-immigration protesters.

April 11. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency, expressed alarm at the growing number of radical mosques in Germany. “Many mosques are dominated by fundamentalists and are being monitored because of their Salafist orientation,” Maassen said. Many of the mosques are being financed by Saudi Arabia.

April 13. Andreas Scheuer, the General Secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Angela Merkel’s CDU, called for an “Islam law” that would limit the influence of foreign imams and prohibit the foreign financing of mosques. His comments came amid reports that the Turkish government has sent 970 clerics — most of whom do not speak German — to lead 900 mosques in Germany that are controlled by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), a branch of the Turkish government’s Directorate for Religious Affairs, known in Turkish as Diyanet. Critics accuse Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of using DITIB mosques to prevent Turkish migrants from integrating into German society.

April 14. Angela Merkel and her coalition partners reached a compromise deal on a new “Integration Law” to spell out the rights and responsibilities of migrants in Germany: asylum seekers must attend German language classes and integration training or have their benefits cut. Critics said the law does not go far enough because it does not threaten with deportation those migrants who refuse to integrate.

April 14. Angela Merkel acquiesced to a demand by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that German comedian Jan Böhmermann be criminally prosecuted for reciting a poem that lampooned Erdogan. She was accused of pandering to Erdogan’s autocratic government.

April 15. A 13-year-old German boy of Iraqi descent was arrested in Turkey after he attempted to join the Islamic State. Police said the boy, originally from Munich, was going to Syria to obtain combat training in order to return to Bavaria to carry out attacks there.

April 24. The Roman Catholic Cardinal of Cologne, Rainer Maria Woelki, ridiculed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) for saying that Islam is incompatible with the German constitution. “Whoever says ‘yes’ to church towers must also say ‘yes’ to minarets.”

MAY 2016

May 1. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) adopted a manifesto calling for curbs to migration and restrictions on Islam. The document called for a ban on minarets, Muslim calls to prayer and full-face veils.

May 2. Hans-Georg Maassen, the German spy chief, revealed that around 90 “predominately Arabic-speaking” mosques in Germany are under surveillance. He said they involve mostly “backyard mosques” where “self-proclaimed imams and self-proclaimed emirs” are “inciting their followers to jihad.”

May 2. A Cologne police superintendent revealed that he was ordered to remove the term “rape” from an internal police report about the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. He said that an official at the North-Rhine Westphalia Interior Ministry told him: “This is not rape. Remove this term from your report. Submit a new report.” The revelation added to suspicions of a political cover-up to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

May 3. A 20-year-old Afghan migrant sexually assaulted a six-year-old boy in the changing room of a sports hall in Munich. Police said the same migrant had sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl at a public swimming pool in 2013.

May 5. An INSA poll found that 60% of the Germans surveyed believe that Islam does not belong to Germany. Nearly half (46%) of those surveyed said they are worried about the “Islamization” of Germany.

May 9. The German branch of Open Doors, a non-governmental organization supporting persecuted Christians, reported that thousands of Christians in German refugee shelters are being persecuted by Muslims, sometimes even by their security guards. The report, which asserts that in most cases German authorities have done nothing to protect the victims, alleges that German authorities and police have deliberately downplayed and even covered up the “taboo issue” of Muslim attacks on Christian refugees, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

May 10. A German man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”) and “infidels must die” stabbed one person to death and slashed three others in an early morning attack at a train station near Munich.

May 11. Turkish-born Muhterem Aras, 50, became the first Muslim woman to be elected as speaker of the state parliament in Baden-Württemberg. Her election was hailed as a Muslim integration success story. Aras has been a proponent of allowing migrants without German citizenship to vote in local elections.

May 12. An appeals court in Bamberg recognized the marriage of a 15-year-old Syrian girl to her 21-year-old cousin. The court ruled that the marriage was valid because it was contracted in Syria, where such marriages are allowed according to Islamic Sharia law. The ruling effectively legalized Sharia child marriages in Germany.

May 14. A Finance Ministry document revealed that the migrant crisis could end up costing German taxpayers €93.6 billion ($105 billion) between now and 2020. About €25.7 billion would be for social spending, such as unemployment benefits and housing support. About €5.7 billion would be destined for language courses and €4.6 billion for integrating refugees into the workforce.

May 15. Nearly a dozen women between the ages of 16 and 48 reported being sexually assaulted by male migrants at a music festival in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. The attacks at the Carnival of Cultures, where groups of men encircled the women and assaulted and robbed them, were similar to those in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve.

May 16. Beatrix von Storch, the deputy leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), called on Germany’s main Islamic associations to “explicitly distance” themselves from Islamic sharia law, something they have so far refused to do. She said the AfD was not opposed to Muslims but to political Islam, which she said contradicts the German constitution.

May 18. Migrants sexually assaulted female passersby at the Boulevard Berlin shopping mall in the Steglitz district of the capital. At least 35 teenage migrants were loitering at the mall, in part because of free access to the internet. When security guards asked them to leave the premises, the youths called for back-up and soon dozens more migrants arrived to harass the guards.

May 22. A doctor in Cologne was sued for discrimination after he declined to treat a Muslim woman who refused to shake his hand. The woman said she could not shake the doctor’s hand on religious grounds. The doctor noted that the Koran does not prohibit handshakes.

May 23. A 23-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker wearing a T-shirt with the words “I’m Muslim Don’t Panic” was assaulted by fellow refugees for offending Islam. He was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized.

May 23. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann announced a plan to recruit migrants to the police force — regardless of whether they have acquired German citizenship. He said he hoped the initiative would create a “more direct line” to people with an immigrant background by hiring those who understand their mentality.

May 26. Increasing numbers of Germans are relocating to Hungary because of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door migration policy, according to the newsmagazine, Focus.

May 27. The head of the Protestant Church in Germany, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, called for Islam to be taught in all German public schools as a way to prevent young Muslims from becoming radicalized. “Tolerance, freedom of religion and freedom of conscience should apply to all religions,” he said. “These principles can be best taught if religion is part of the state’s educational mission.”

May 27. A Protestant church in Hamburg held a funeral service for a convert to Islam who was killed in Syria while fighting for the Islamic State. The funeral at the St. Pauli church was for a teenager who was born in Cameroon and raised as a Christian in Hamburg. When he was 14 he converted to Islam, became radicalized and joined the German Salafist movement. He left for Syria on a false passport. Pastor Sieghard Wilm, who organized the “interfaith” funeral, said the church should be a “place of learning for the respect of other religions.”

May 29. Green party politician Stefanie von Berg called for new mosques to be built in every district of Hamburg so that the city’s burgeoning Muslim population has enough space to pray. She said the construction of new mosques is necessary to integrate the Muslim community. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank linked to the Green party, estimates that there are more than 150,000 Muslims in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, but fewer than 50 mosques.

May 31. Male migrants sexually assaulted at least 18 women at an outdoor festival in Darmstadt. The attacks at the Schlossgrabenfest, in which large numbers of men surrounded women and sexually assaulted them, were similar to those that occurred in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

May 31. The Dalai Lama said that Germany has accepted “too many” migrants and that they should eventually be returned to help rebuild their home countries. “Germany cannot become an Arab country,” he said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Germany is Germany.”

JUNE 2016

June 2. A new statistical survey of Germany showed that ethnic Turks are economically and educationally less successful than other immigrant groups. The report, produced by Destatis, Germany’s official statistics agency, showed that more than one-third (36%) of ethnic Turks live below the poverty line. Only 60% complete secondary school (Hauptschulabschluss), while less than 10% of ethnic Turks between the ages of 17 and 45 earn a Bachelor’s degree. Education is a determinative factor for successful integration, the report said.

June 2. Three Syrian jihadists were arrested for plotting a jihadist attack in Düsseldorf. A fourth individual was arrested in France. The plan involved two suicide bombers who would blow themselves up along the Heinrich-Heine-Allee, a busy street in the city center. Subsequently, other assassins would kill as many passers-by as possible with guns and bombs.

June 3. The head of the German police union, Rainer Wendt, said that budget cuts in the public sector made it impossible to vet all of the migrants coming into Germany. He was responding to demands that all migrants undergo immediate security checks.

June 12. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel compared members of the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD), the third-largest party in Germany, to the Nazis.

June 13. Half of the three million ethnic Turks living in Germany believe it is more important to follow Islamic Sharia law than German law if the two are in conflict, according to a survey. One-third also yearn for German society to “return” to the way it was during the time of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, in the Arabia of the early seventh century. The survey — which polled Turks who have been living in Germany for many years, often decades — refuted claims by German authorities that Muslims are well integrated into German society.

June 25. Police discovered a huge stockpile of military-grade weapons in a grocery store near a mosque in Cologne. “The danger posed by fundamentalist Salafists who are arming themselves to use violence in Germany is very great,” said local politician Ismail Tipi. “This secret raid makes this more than clear.”

June 30. A court in Ahrensburg found a 17-year-old migrant from Eritrea guilty of attempting to rape an 18-year-old woman at the Bad Oldesloe train station. After police arrived, the migrant resisted arrest and head-butted a police officer, who was hospitalized. The court gave the man a seven-month suspended sentence.

JULY 2016

July 1. A court in Bavaria ruled that a law that prohibits Muslim legal trainees from wearing headscarves is illegal.

July 3. A 24-year-old woman, raped by three migrants in Mannheim in January, admitted to lying about the identity of her attackers. Selin Gören, a Turkish-German woman, initially said that her attackers were German nationals, when in fact they were Muslim migrants. Gören said she lied because she was afraid of fueling racism against migrants.

July 4. The 30 biggest German companies have employed only 54 refugees, including 50 who have been hired as couriers by Deutsche Post, the logistics provider. The data cast doubt on Angela Merkel’s promise to integrate asylum seekers into the German labor market as quickly as possible. Company executives say the main problem is that migrants lack professional qualifications and German language skills.

July 7. The German parliament approved changes to the criminal code to expand the definition of rape. Also known as the “No Means No” (“Nein heißt Nein”) law, any form of non-consensual sex will now be punishable as a crime. Previously, only cases in which victims could show that they physically resisted their attackers were punishable under German law. The changes, which were prompted by the sex attacks in Cologne, were hailed as a “paradigm shift” in German jurisprudence.

July 7. More than six months after the Cologne attacks, a German court issued the first two convictions: The District Court of Cologne gave a 20-year-old Iraqi and a 26-year-old Algerian a one-year suspended sentence and then released the two men. Observers said the light sentences were a mockery of justice.

July 10. A Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) inquiry into the sex attacks in Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and other German cities on New Year’s Eve found that more than 1,200 women were victims of attacks, which were perpetrated by more than 2,000 men, most of whom are believed to be from North Africa. BKA President Holger Münch said: “There is a relationship between the attacks and the strong wave of migration in 2015.”

July 13. The Platanus-Schule, a private bilingual school in Berlin, apologized to a Muslim imam after a teacher at the school called him “misogynistic” and “ill-adapted to German life” because he refused to shake her hand. Critics accused the school of endangering the principle of gender equality in Germany. The imam’s lawyer said the apology was insufficient.

July 14. Ruprecht Polenz, a former secretary general of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said that the German law which regulates name changes (Namensrecht) should be amended to make it easier for Muslim migrants in Germany who feel discriminated against to change their legal names to Christian-sounding ones.

July 15. At least 24 women were sexually assaulted at a music festival in Bremen. The attacks were similar to the attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Police were able to identify only five perpetrators, all of whom are migrants from Afghanistan.

July 16. A document leaked to Der Spiegel revealed that more than 33,000 migrants who are supposed to be deported are still in Germany and are being cared for by German taxpayers. Many of the migrants destroyed their passports and are believed to have lied about their countries of origin to make it impossible for them to be deported.

July 17. An investigative report by Bavarian Radio BR24 found that deradicalization programs in Germany are failing because many Salafists do not want to become deradicalized.

July 19. A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker brandishing an axe and shouting “Allahu Akbar” seriously injured five people on a train in Würzburg. The assailant was shot dead by police after he charged at them with the axe. The teenager had been placed with a foster family just two weeks before the attack as a reward for being “well integrated.” Green Party MP Renate Künast criticized the police for using lethal force.

July 19. The managers of a German Red Cross refugee shelter in Potsdam were accused of covering up the sexual abuse of women at the facility.

July 20. The Federal Labor Office reported that the educational level of newly arrived migrants in Germany is far lower than expected: only a quarter have a high school diploma, while three quarters have no vocational training at all. Only 4% of new arrivals to Germany are highly qualified.

July 22. Ali Sonboly, an 18-year-old Iranian-German who harbored hatred for Arabs and Turks, killed ten people (including himself) and wounded 35 others at a McDonald’s in Munich.

July 23. A mob of men shouting “Allahu Akbar” barged into a nudist beach in Xanten and “insulted and threatened” the beachgoers. Police kept the incident hidden, apparently to avoid negative media coverage of Muslims “in these sensitive times.”

July 24. Mohammed Daleel, a 27-year-old migrant from Syria whose asylum application was rejected, injured 15 people when he blew himself up at a concert in Ansbach. The suicide bombing was the first in Germany attributed to the Islamic State.

July 24. A 21-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker murdered a 45-year-old Polish woman and her unborn baby in a machete attack in Reutlingen.

July 24. A 40-year-old migrant from Eritrea raped a 79-year-old woman in a cemetery in Ibbenbüren. The woman, who lives in a local nursing home, was visiting the grave of her late sister at 6AM when the attack occurred.

July 25. A 45-year-old Palestinian brandishing a “Rambo knife” and shouting “Allahu Akbar” tried to behead a doctor in Bonn. The attacker’s 19-year-old son had complained about the doctor’s treatment for a fractured leg. The man, holding the doctor down on the floor, said: “Apologize to my son. Go down on your knees and kiss his hand.”

July 25. Frank Henkel, a CDU Senator from Berlin, said: “No one should delude themselves: We obviously have imported some brutal people who are capable of committing barbaric crimes in our country. We have to say this clearly and without taboos. This also means that we must deal aggressively with Islamism. If we do not, we risk that German politics will be perceived as being detached from reality.”

July 25. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière revealed that German authorities are currently investigating 59 refugees because of the “suspicion that they are involved in terrorist structures.”

July 27. Police in Ludwigsburg arrested a 15-year-old who they said was planning a mass-shooting. Police found more than 300 rounds of ammunition, as well as knives, chemicals and bullet-proof vests, during a search of the teenager’s home.

July 28. Angela Merkel insisted there would be no change to her open-door migration stance: “We decided to fulfill our humanitarian tasks. Refusing humanitarian support would be something I would not want to do and I would not recommend this to Germany…. Anxiety and fear cannot guide our political decisions.”

July 29. Thomas Jahn, the vice chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU), lambasted Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy: “We need to control our borders. That is the most important thing at the moment. And we need to send the dangerous people with Islamist ideology back to the countries outside Europe and the European Union.”

July 30. CSU politician Jens Spahn called for a burqa ban: “A ban on the full body veil — that is the niqab and the burqa — is overdue… I do not want to have to encounter any burqa in this country. In that sense, I am a burqaphobe.”

AUGUST 2016

August 2. Amid fears of Islamic terrorism, German officials raised the possibility of deploying the military within German borders for the first time since World War II.

August 11. Muslim patrols enforcing Sharia law were seen operating in the Wandsbek and Dammtor district of Hamburg.

August 16. Asylum seekers in Lower Saxony refused to accept job offers because they were “guests of Angela Merkel.”

August 19. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière called for a partial ban on full-face veils in public. “We unanimously reject the burqa,” de Maizière said. “It does not fit in our open country.” North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Ralf Jäger, said a burqa ban was misguided because it would require a ban on all religious garb: “Whoever forbids burqas, must also forbid people disguised as Saint Nicholas.”

August 25. Police in Hamburg launched a crackdown on purse-snatchers. More than 20,000 purses—roughly 55 a day—are stolen in the city each year. According to police, 90% of the purses are stolen by young males from North Africa or the Balkans.

August 28. A 26-year-old German national shouting Allahu Akhbar stabbed a 66-year-old woman and a 57-year-old man who were picnicking in Oberhausen.

August 28. Angela Merkel urged people of Turkish origin living in Germany not to bring their conflicts to Germany.

SEPTEMBER 2016

September 3. Only 2,500 people attended a mass rally in Berlin to protest the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The organizers of the rally, including members of the Green Party, and the Left Party, had expected around 10,000 demonstrators to show up.

September 3. The Vice Chairman of the DPolG German Police Union in Hamburg, Freddi Lohse, said that many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behavior. “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries,” he said. “They have no respect for us.”

September 4. Angela Merkel suffered a major blow when the Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged ahead of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in elections in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. With 20.8% of the vote, the AfD came in second place behind the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) (30.6%). Merkel’s CDU came in third place, with 19% of the vote, the worst result it has ever had in Meck-Pomm, as the state is called for short. The election in Meck-Pomm was widely seen as a referendum on Merkel’s open-door migration policy.

September 6. Migrants committed 142,500 crimes during the first six months of 2016, according to a report by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 32.5 crimes each hour, an increase of nearly 40% over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a migrant suspect has been caught.

September 7. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) calculated that Germany will spend some €20 billion on refugees in 2016. “Particularly large portions of the expenditure involve … the initial provision of accommodation or health care services, as well as services such as the renting of accommodations,” IfW said.

September 9. The German Interior Ministry, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed that 1,475 married children are known to be living in Germany as of July 31, 2016 — including 361 children under the age of 14. Most of the married children are from Syria (664), Afghanistan (157) and Iraq (100). Nearly 80% (1,152) are girls. The true number of child marriages in Germany is believed to be much higher than the official statistics suggest because many are being concealed.

September 13. Muslim fashion shops in Germany are serving as stepping stones to Islamic extremism, according to Germany’s ARD public broadcaster. They are “competing” with Western socialization by helping women adopt an orthodox Islamic way of life, eventually assimilating them into Salafism and subsequently, extremist Islam.

September 13. Three Syrian jihadists were arrested in Schleswig-Holstein. They were believed to be members of an Islamic State sleeper cell waiting for further instructions to carry out attacks in Germany.

September 17. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann accused the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) of failing to root out potentially tens of thousands of fake passports. Many migrants entering Europe as Syrians are, in fact, from another country of origin. Almost 40% of all Moroccans who entered Greece falsely represented themselves as Syrians, according to one study.

September 23. A new poll showed that support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged to 16%, its best result ever, and more than three times the 5% needed to win seats in the parliament. According to the poll, Angela Merkel’s CDU is at 32%, while the Social Democrats, the junior partner in the ruling coalition, would get 22%. Together they would have 54%, enough for the ruling coalition to continue.

September 30. A 28-year-old migrant sexually assaulted a 27-year-old woman on a train. German media initially reported the nationality of the perpetrator but then deleted the information. “This article initially included the nationality of the offender,” a statement said. “The reference was subsequently removed because it did not correspond to our editorial guidelines — that is, there is no connection between nationality and action.”

OCTOBER 2016

October 1. Two migrants raped a 23-year-old woman in Lüneburg as she was walking in a park with her young child. The men, who remain at large, forced the child to watch while they took turns assaulting the woman.

October 2. A 19-year-old migrant raped a 90-year-old woman as she was leaving a church in downtown Düsseldorf. Police initially described the suspect as “a Southern European with North African roots.” It later emerged that the man is a Moroccan with a Spanish passport.

October 2. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble called for the development of a “German Islam” to help integrate Muslims in the country.

October 4. The 2016 Munich Oktoberfest recorded its lowest turnout since 2001. Visitors reportedly stayed away due to concerns about terrorism and migrant-related sexual assaults.

October 17. The German Press Council reprimanded the weekly newspaper, Junge Freiheit, for revealing the nationality of three Afghan teenagers who raped a woman at a train station in Vienna, Austria. The press council said the nationality of the perpetrators is “not relevant” to the case. By revealing this information, the newspaper “deliberately and pejoratively represented the suspects as second-class persons.”

October 24. A YouGov poll found that 68% of Germans believe that security in the country has deteriorated due to mass migration. Nearly 70% of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63% feel unsafe at large public events.

October 24. Serbian teenagers in Hamburg were allowed to walk free after gang-raping a 14-year-old girl and leaving her for dead in sub-zero temperatures. The judge said that although “the penalties may seem mild to the public,” the teens no longer posed a danger to society.

October 27. Public prosecutors charged Shaas Al-M, a 19-year-old Syrian jihadist who arrived in Germany posing as a refugee, with plotting to bomb popular tourist sites in Berlin, including the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, for the Islamic State.

NOVEMBER 2016

November 3. Five Somali migrants went on a rampage after the owner of a pub in Wabern asked them to pay for the alcohol they had consumed. “We are Somalis, we don’t pay,” the men said before smashing up the establishment.

November 11. The Military Intelligence Service (Militärische Abschirmdienst, MAD) reported that more than 20 Islamists are serving in the German armed forces, and another 60 service members are suspected of being Islamists. Some 30 veterans are known to have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq. The report raised concerns that Islamists are joining the German armed forces in order to obtain combat training.

November 15. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière banned the Salafist group, “The True Religion” (Die wahre Religion), for being unconstitutional. The group is behind a mass proselytization campaign — Project “Read!” — aimed at distributing 25 million copies of the Koran, translated into the German language, with the goal of placing one Koran into every home in Germany, free of charge. De Maizière said the campaign amounted to a “systematic infringement of our fundamental values.”

November 18. Public prosecutors charged two North African migrants for setting fire to a migrant shelter in Düsseldorf. The arson attack, which injured 26 people and caused more than 10 million euros in damage, was reportedly triggered by a dispute over food. The two men were angry because they felt there were not enough sweets offered at a buffet lunch.

November 20. A 38-year-old German-Kurdish man in Lower Saxony tied his ex-wife to his car and dragged her through the streets of Hameln. The crime drew attention to the problem of Sharia justice in Germany.

November 21. The Wuppertal District Court ruled that seven Islamists who formed a vigilante patrol to enforce Sharia law on the streets of Wuppertal did not break German law and were simply exercising their right to free speech.

November 23. Bild, the largest-circulation newspaper in Germany, warned that the country was “capitulating to Islamic law.”

November 27. German radio broadcaster Deutschlandradio Kultur reported that Muslim migrants enrolled in German schools are bullying their Christian counterparts. In some cases, the persecution is so great that Christian parents have moved their children to other schools.

November 29. A German intelligence officer confessed to plotting to bomb the Cologne-based headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency, the BfV. The 51-year-old convert to Islam was tasked with monitoring the German Salafist scene.

DECEMBER 2016

December 3. A 17-year-old Afghan migrant was arrested for raping and murdering a 19-year-old medical student in Freiburg. Police said she may have met her killer at the asylum shelter where she was a volunteer. Freiburg Mayor Dieter Salomon warned against making generalizations about migrants because this crime was an “isolated case.”

December 6. Eyeing reelection, Angela Merkel called for a burka ban: “The full veil is not appropriate here and it should be forbidden wherever that is legally possible.” In September, Merkel said she was opposed to a burka ban because it would violate “religious freedom.”

December 8. The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, Germany’s highest court, ruled that Muslim girls must take part in mixed swimming classes at school, finding against an 11-year-old pupil who had argued that even wearing a burkini, or full-body swimsuit, breached Islamic dress codes. The court rejected an appeal by the girl’s parents that she should be excused from the classes because a burkini did not conform to the Islamic standard of decency.

December 13. The trial began of a 45-year-old Iraqi migrant accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old boy 68 times at a refugee shelter in Spandau, Berlin. The perpetrator said his actions were the result of a “love affair.”

December 14. A judge in Oldenburg ruled that a 19-year-old Afghan migrant who groped two women at a festival in Bad Zwischenahn was not guilty of sexual assault. “It is quite conceivable that the young man wanted to communicate his interest for the women in this way,” the judge said.

December 16. A 12-year-old German boy of Iraqi descent tried to detonate a nail bomb at a Christmas market in Ludwigshafen.

December 19. At least 12 people were killed and dozens injured after a truck rammed into a Christmas market in Berlin. The main suspect in the attack was Anis Amri, a 23-year-old migrant from Tunisia who arrived in Germany in July 2015 and applied for asylum in April 2016. Although Amri’s application for asylum had been rejected in July 2016, he was not deported because he did not have a valid passport.

December 20. Frauke Petry, the chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany, said Angela Merkel bears responsibility for the attack on the Berlin Christmas market:

“The milieu in which such acts can flourish has been negligently and systematically imported over the past year and a half. Our borders, which were so irresponsibly opened, must once again be controlled. Germany is no longer safe.”

December 22. Bild reported that the head of the judicial authority in Hamburg, Till Steffen, refused to allow police to release pictures of the Berlin terror suspect, Anis Amri, for more than 12 hours after the attack because he feared that sharing the images would incite racial hatred.

December 22. Underage migrants at a refugee shelter in Freising were watching Islamic State propaganda videos, creating jihadist flags and posing with the insignia of the terrorist organization in front of the camera. “Watching IS-videos or crafting an IS-flag may indicate that a radicalization process is at an advanced stage,” German authorities said.

December 27. Police arrested seven migrants from Syria and Libya on charges of setting a homeless man on fire on Christmas Eve at the Schönleinstraße subway station in Berlin. Video footage captured them laughing as the man was burning on the platform. Police said all seven of the perpetrators, the youngest of whom is 15, arrived in Berlin as refugees.

December 31. Police in Cologne — who were tasked with avoiding a repeat of the mass sexual assaults that occurred in the city on New Year’s Eve in 2015 — were accused of racial profiling when they questioned more than 600 migrants from North Africa.

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2016 to become around 5.5% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.

The growth of Britain’s Muslim population can be attributed to immigration, high birth rates and conversions to Islam.

Islam and Islam-related issues, omnipresent in Britain during 2016, can be categorized into five broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists in Syria and Iraq; 2) the continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) the sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; 4) Muslim integration into British society; and 5) the failures of British multiculturalism.

JANUARY 2016

January 3. A jihadist with a London accent appeared in an Islamic State propaganda video after the group executed five men accused of spying for the UK. The masked gunman warned Prime Minister David Cameron that the West could never defeat the Islamic State. The video also showed a young boy, aged around four and with a British accent, threatening to kill non-Muslims.

January 4. British officials traveled to Sudan to stanch the flow of UK-born medics joining the Islamic State. More than a dozen British doctors studying at Sudan’s University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST) have joined the Islamic State to treat jihadists in Syria. Parents said they had sent their children to study in Sudan to reconnect them with their African and Islamic roots before returning to practice medicine in Britain.

January 4. The Jamiatul Ummah School in Tower Hamlets, East London, failed an inspection when investigators from Ofsted, the official agency that regulates British schools, found extremist material in its library, including books that call for stoning women.

January 5. Pastor James McConnell, a 78-year-old pastor from Belfast, was cleared of charges that he violated the Communications Act 2003 when, in a sermon broadcast on the internet, he described Islam as “heathen,” “Satanic” and “a doctrine spawned in hell.” Judge Liam McNally said: “The courts need to be very careful not to criticize speech which, however contemptible, is no more than offensive. It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances.”

January 6. A man and a woman were arrested on suspicion of terrorism after attempting to board a UK-bound flight with fake Belgian passports. The pair, understood to be brother and sister, were arrested at Cristoforo Colombo Airport in Genoa, Italy, while trying to board the flight. Fears were raised that the pair, who claimed to be Syrian refugees, might be jihadis after police found violent images on their smartphones.

January 6. A House of Commons briefing paper on polygamy revealed that recent reforms to the social security system would allow migrants in polygamous marriages to claim additional benefits payments. Although polygamy is illegal in Britain, some 300,000 people are believed to be living in such unions in the country.

January 6. The Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents examination boards in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, reached an agreement with Muslim groups to reschedule crucial exams during the next three years to avoid clashing with Ramadan, when observant Muslim pupils would be expected to fast.

January 8. A Muslim woman who claimed she was assaulted in downtown Birmingham for wearing a hijab days after the Paris attacks was fined after video footage proved she fabricated her story.

January 8. Islamic extremists were allowed to tour British universities unchallenged, even though universities and colleges are legally required to prevent extremists radicalizing students on campus, according to the Daily Mail.

January 9. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, an official government body, was found to be helping asylum seekers overturn their convictions for illegal entry to Britain in order to allow them to receive refugee status and remain in the UK. MPs said the practice could “undermine deterrence” and lead to thousands more illegal arrivals.

January 15. London Police released video footage of a hijab-clad woman who tried to stab a 15-year-old boy on a bus in Lambeth.

January 16. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond revealed that some 1,500 Britons tried to join the Islamic State since 2012. An estimated 800 people, mostly jihadists and family members, successfully entered Syria; roughly half are still there. Another 600 were stopped, either as they tried to leave Britain, or after arriving in Turkey.

January 18. Prime Minister David Cameron announced a plan to invest £20 million (€33 million; $28 million) in English classes for Muslim women to reduce the risk of extremism. He said migrants to Britain who cannot pass an English test within 2-1/2 years of arriving may not be allowed to stay. British Muslim groups accused Cameron of demonizing their communities.

January 19. Muhammad Shamsuddin, a 39-year-old London-based Islamist, was featured in a new documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door.” Shamsuddin, a divorced father of five who lives on state handouts and claims he cannot work because he has “chronic fatigue syndrome,” was filmed preaching hate against non-Muslims on British streets.

Muhammad Shamsuddin, a 39-year-old London-based Islamist, was featured in a documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door.” Shamsuddin, a divorced father of five who lives on state handouts and claims he cannot work because he has “chronic fatigue syndrome,” was filmed preaching hate against non-Muslims on British streets. (Image source: Channel 4 video screenshot)

January 19. The government launched a new website, “Educate against Hate,” aimed at helping schools and parents to tackle the “spell of twisted ideologies.”

January 22. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, called on British clergymen to grow beards to reach out to Muslims in their areas.

January 24. Behar Kasemi, a 42-year-old refugee from Kosovo, was jailed for four weeks after he threatened to cut out his wife’s heart because she had become “too English.” He told police: “In my country it is for the women to obey their husbands and look after the children.”

January 25. One in five prisoners in Britain’s top-security prisons are Muslim. The eight Category A prisons contain 5,885 highly dangerous inmates and 1,229 — 20.8% — are Muslim. By comparison, 5.5% of the overall UK population is Muslim.

January 25. The Royal Air Force foiled a jihadist plot by two commercial airline pilots to bomb four British cities. The pilots, who were leaving Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport for a Middle Eastern country, were heard discussing attacks on London, Bath, Brighton and Ipswich. They were using the emergency “Mayday” channel in the belief they were not being monitored.

January 29. A judge in New York sentenced Mahdi Hashi, a 26-year-old Somali-born British citizen, to nine years in prison for joining al-Shabaab, a jihadist group based in East Africa. Hashi, who grew up in London, first came to Britain as a six-year-old when his family fled the civil war in Somalia. His British citizenship was revoked in July 2012 due to his “extremist activities.” He was later deported to the United States.

January 29. Ibrahim Anderson, 38, a convert to Islam, and Shah Jahan Khan, 63, were sentenced to a total of five years in prison for promoting the Islamic State on London’s Oxford Street.

January 30. Three Somalis who gang-raped a 16-year-old girl after luring her into a hotel bathroom in Manchester were sentenced to a total of 29 years in prison. The men, who showed no remorse for their actions, were said to be living according to the laws of Somalia, not Britain.

FEBRUARY 2016

February 8. In a speech on prison reform, David Cameron said the government is considering placing all convicted Islamist terrorist prisoners in England and Wales in a single secure unit in order to prevent them from recruiting other prisoners.

February 16. A man in Scotland was arrested for posting a series of “offensive comments” about Syria refugees on Facebook. Twelve Syrian families arrived on the remote Scottish island of Bute as part of the Home Office’s Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement program.

February 16. Shabir Ahmed, the 63-year-old leader of a Rochdale child sex grooming gang, cited human rights laws as he launched an appeal against deportation from Britain. Ahmed —described by a judge as a “violent hypocritical bully” — wrote to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) claiming that his convictions for child sex offenses were a conspiracy to “scapegoat” Muslims.

February 17. At least 21 illegal Islamic schools were placed under investigation over fears of radicalization. Inspectors from Ofsted, the school’s regulator, found that the institutions were teaching “hate-filled, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic material.”

February 28. Sharia courts administering Islamic justice in Britain are run by clerics who believe some offenders should have their hands chopped off, according to Muslim scholar Elham Manea. She said that some clerics also believe girls can be married at the age of 12. She described the prevailing attitude as “totalitarian” and as more backward than some parts of Pakistan.

February 29. Girls in Britain as young as 11 are being forced into marriage via the internet while others are being secretly wed over the phone. Imams in Britain and abroad have been conducting ceremonies using Skype to marry British girls remotely to men abroad. The new husband is often promised that he will get a visa to come to Britain.

MARCH 2016

March 4. Ali Abdullahi, a 34-year-old migrant from Somalia who sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at a train station in Torquay, told the Exeter Crown Court that the crime was a misunderstanding caused by “cultural differences.”

March 9. London is more “Islamic” than much of the Muslim world, according to Maulana Syed Ali Raza Rizvi, a prominent Shia cleric who was born in Pakistan. “I feel that London has more Islamic values than many of the Muslim countries put together,” he said.

March 9. An eight-year-old girl was taken into protective custody after a man and a woman were arrested at Heathrow Airport in connection with alleged female genital mutilation offenses. The girl was believed to have been taken Somalia to carry out FGM overseas.

March 11. Staff at a nursery in Luton referred a four-year-old boy to a de-radicalization program after the child drew an image of a man with a large chopping knife. Teachers said they believed he was saying “cooker bomb” instead of “cucumber.”

March 15. The Islamic Society at the London School of Economics held a gala dinner where men and women were segregated by a seven-foot screen so that attendees could not look at one another.

March 15. The Muslim Women’s Council in Bradford announced plans to build Britain’s first female-led mosque.

March 16. The High Court ruled that an 18-year-old girl who was born and raised in London and who ran away from home because her parents “were not strict enough Muslims” should be provided with government housing and a wide range of financial assistance until she turns 21.

March 17. A family court in London ruled that four children must be immunized after their Muslim mother refused consent because she said the vaccines contained pork gelatin.

March 20: A total of 3,955 people were referred to the Channel program, the British government’s de-radicalization scheme, in 2015, nearly triple the figure (1,681) in 2014.

March 28. Teaching children fundamental British values is an act of “cultural supremacism,” according to the National Union of Teachers (NUT), which wants to replace the concept with one that includes “international rights.”

March 31. The Islamic Tarbiyah Academy, a private Muslim school in Yorkshire, was accused of promoting Islamic extremism. The founder of the school, Mufti Zubair Dudha, belongs to the orthodox Deobandi sect, which is thought to control half of all mosques and madrasas in the UK. Dudha has warned Muslims not to adopt British customs, and told them they should be prepared to “expend … even life” to create a world organized “according to Allah’s just order.”

APRIL 2016

April 1. The first gym in Wales exclusively for Muslim women opened in Cardiff.

April 3. About 1,000 Muslim prisoners are at risk of being radicalized in British jails as part of “terrorist academies,” according to Lord Falconer, the shadow justice secretary.

April 4. Muslim extremists have turned part of the Gartree prison into a “no-go zone,” according to prison union leaders. They believe an entire block of the facility is being run under Sharia law.

April 13. A new study showed that a significant part of the British Muslim community is becoming a separate “nation within a nation.” The 615-page survey found that more than 100,000 British Muslims sympathize with suicide bombers. Only one in three British Muslims (34%) would contact the police if they believed that somebody close to them had become involved with jihadists. In addition, 23% of British Muslims said Islamic Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations.

April 18. Muslim preachers approved by the government are routinely distributing extremist literature in British prisons leaving hundreds of inmates at risk of radicalization, according to a leaked report.

April 22. Tarik Hassane and Suhaib Majeed, a pair of home-grown terrorists, were given life sentences for plotting to kill soldiers, police officers and civilians in a series of Islamic-State-inspired drive-by shootings. The judge said: “It is shocking, tragic and deplorable that you, two young British men, educated through the UK school system, undertaking university courses, should be so influenced by the bloodthirsty version of Islam presented by ISIS and other similarly minded groups.”

MAY 2016

May 1. Mubashir Jamil, a 21-year-old man from Luton, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to travel to Syria to engage in “violent jihad” with the Islamic State.

May 2. A senior British jihadi who boasted of recruiting hundreds of Britons for the Islamic State was killed in a drone strike in Syria. Raphael Hostey, also known as Abu Qaqa al-Britani, left Manchester to join the Islamic State in 2013. The 23-year-old graphic designer became a key recruiter of British fighters and jihadi brides for the group.

May 4. The “Department of Theology” of the Blackburn Muslim Association ruled that it is “not permissible” for a woman to travel more than 48 miles — deemed to be the equivalent of three days walk — without her husband or a close male relative. The group also ruled that men must grow beards and women must cover their faces. The rulings were accompanied by the catchphrase: “Allah knows best.”

May 7. Labour Party politician Sadiq Khan was sworn in as mayor of London. He is the first Muslim to lead a major European capital. During the election campaign, Khan faced a stream of allegations about his past dealings with Muslim extremists and anti-Semites. British politician Paul Weston warned that Khan’s rise is a harbinger of things to come:

“The previously unthinkable has become the present reality. A Muslim man with way too many extremist links to be entirely coincidental is now the Mayor of London. In a couple more decades Britain may well have its first Muslim Prime Minister. Reality cannot argue with demographics, so the realistic future for Britain is Islamic.”

May 7. Mohammed Shaheen, a 43-year-old father of seven, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for raping underage schoolgirls. Shaheen, an immigrant from Pakistan, insisted he was a devout Muslim who had been framed by his victims.

May 8. Britain’s biggest Muslim charity branded hundreds of buses around the country with an Arabic slogan proclaiming “glory to Allah.” Islamic Relief said the initiative was an attempt to “break down barriers” during Ramadan and portray Islam in a positive light.

May 8. Six Algerian terror suspects with links to al-Qaeda were allowed to stay in Britain after winning a protracted legal battle. The government ruled that there was a “real risk” the men would be tortured by the Algerian security services if they were deported. This would have violated the Human Rights Act.

May 9. A Muslim man who was found guilty of threatening to behead a candidate of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) had his sentence overturned on appeal. Aftab Ahmed, 45, had been found guilty of making threats to kill David Robinson-Young, but a Newcastle Crown Court judge said he believed that Ahmed did not intend to act on his threat.

May 10. The Greater Manchester Police (GMP) apologized for a counter-terrorism exercise in which a mock suicide bomber shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”). Eight hundred volunteers took part in the drill to make it as realistic as possible. A local Muslim leader, Syed Azhar Shah, said it was “shocking to portray Muslims as terrorists” and accused the GMP of “institutional racism.”

May 10. The trial began of three Muslims who plotted to behead British citizens after being inspired by an Islamic State order “to kill civilians everywhere in the West.”

May 11. Prime Minister David Cameron apologized to Suliman Gani, a Muslim extremist, for saying he is a supporter of the Islamic State. Cameron said he was referring to reports that Gani supports “an” Islamic state rather than “the” Islamic State. The Muslim Council of Britain called for an “urgent review” of Islamophobia in the Conservative party.

May 15. The BBC’s religious output is too Christian, according to Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics. He argued that that Muslim, Hindu and Sikh faiths should get more airtime.

May 16. The government confirmed that Sharia-compliant student loans will be offered for the first time in Britain as part of an effort to boost the number of young Muslims applying to university. The new finance model complies with Sharia law, which forbids Muslims from taking out loans on which they would be charged interest.

May 17. One-third of Muslim adults in Britain do not feel “part of British culture,” according to a new report on British multiculturalism. Nearly half (47%) of Muslims consider their Islamic faith to be the most important part of their identity.

May 17. Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, has become “like a jihadi training camp,” according to testimony from a former inmate. “The problem is that Belmarsh is also a holding prison and so young people who are brainwashed and indoctrinated then go out into the wider prison system and create wider Akhi [brotherhood] networks.” Muslims comprise 30% of inmates at Belmarsh.

May 17. Brusthom Ziamani, a 20-year-old Muslim convert who was arrested in East London for plotting to behead a British soldier, had his sentence reduced. Judges reviewing his case said that “given his youth” his sentence was “too long.”

May 18. Ofsted, the government agency responsible for regulating British schools, admitted that it failed properly to inspect the Zakaria Muslim Girls’ High School in Batley because the inspector was “prohibited” from talking to pupils or staff. The school is run by the Deobandis, a conservative Muslim sect that is said to shun non-Muslims.

May 18. The Queen’s Speech, setting out the government’s program for the next session of parliament, unveiled a controversial new counter-extremism bill that included powers to gag individuals and ban organizations deemed as extremist. The bill did not, however, include a definition of extremism. Critics said the proposals risked creating “thought police.”

May 18. Akmal Afzal, a 23-year-old Briton of Pakistani descent who was arrested at the 2012 London Olympics after giving police a false name, filed a lawsuit for discrimination. He claims he was arrested because he was an “Asian man with a beard.”

May 22. The government was accused of burying a report on prison extremism. The report warned that staff have been reluctant to tackle Islamist behavior for fear of being labelled “racist.”

May 23. El Shafee Elsheikh, 27, was identified as the fourth member of the Islamic State execution cell responsible for beheading 27 hostages. The four guards, led by “Jihadi John,” were nicknamed the “Beatles” because of their English accents. Elsheikh, who was granted asylum in Britain when he was seven, left for Syria after being radicalized at a London mosque.

May 23. A British Muslim woman was jailed after she tried to take her children to Syria. Lorna Moore, 34, failed to tell police that her husband was a jihadist with the Islamic State. She was planning to take her three young children, one of them 11 months old, to the war zone.

May 23. A survey conducted by ComRes on behalf of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK found that 33% of British adults believe that Islam promotes violence in the UK. The study also found that 56% of Britons disagree with the view that Islam is compatible with British values.

May 24. A National Health Service (NHS) doctor left his wife and two children in Sheffield to join the Islamic State. Issam Abuanza, 37, a Palestinian doctor with British citizenship, was the first practicing NHS doctor known to have joined the Islamic State.

May 25. Police in West Yorkshire revealed that they were investigating 220 alleged cases of child sex grooming in Keighley and Bradford. The cases involve 261 suspects and 188 victims.

May 26. Home Secretary Theresa May established an independent review into the “misuse” of Sharia law in Britain. The review will not, however, examine whether Sharia law discriminates against women.

May 27. A British citizen who plotted to carry out a suicide bomb attack at Heathrow Airport was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Minh Quang Pham, 33, was sentenced in New York for travelling to Yemen to train with members of al-Qaeda. Pham, a Vietnamese born British convert to Islam, was extradited to the United States in February 2015.

May 29. Music festivals, sports venues and nightclubs were placed on “high alert” for potential jihadist attacks. Neil Basu of the Metropolitan Police warned: “These people are perfectly happy to target civilians with the maximum terror impact. Crowded places were always a concern for us, but now they are right at the top of the agenda.”

May 31. The trial began of Somalia-born Muhiddin Mire, 30, who tried to decapitate a random stranger in the London Underground. “This is for my Syrian brothers,” he yelled. “I am going to spill your blood.” Police found images on Mire’s cellphone of Islamic State hostages having their throats cut.

JUNE 2016

June 2. Aaqil Ahmed, the head of religion and ethics at the BBC, said Britons should admit the “uncomfortable” truth that Islamic State is made up of Muslims and their doctrine is Islamic: “I hear so many people say ISIS has nothing to do with Islam — of course it has. They are not preaching Judaism.”

June 2. A manual used by imams to teach prison inmates about Islam risks “turning people into jihadis,” Sheikh Musa Admani told the BBC. A section of the program on jihad said that taking up arms to fight “evil” is “one of the noblest acts.”

June 27. An article in the Economist magazine argued that some forms of female genital mutilation (FGM) should be allowed because “minor” forms of the practice might prevent girls from more extreme harm.

June 27. Shakeel Begg of the Lewisham Islamic Centre sued the BBC for libel over a broadcast which implied that he was a member of a “rogue’s gallery of extremists.” A lawyer for the BBC responded: “The basis for calling the claimant an extremist is short and simple. He has preached jihad as the greatest of deeds which in this context clearly means violence in the name of Islam.”

JULY 2016

July 1. A Muslim taxi driver in Leicester refused to pick up a blind couple because they had a guide dog. “Me, I not take the dog,” the driver said. “For me, it’s about my religion.”

July 1. A judge in London ordered the deportation of Saliman Barci, a 41-year-old Albanian man who posed as a refugee from Kosovo and collected the full range of welfare payments in Britain for 14 years. It was discovered that in 2009, a court in Albania sentenced Barci in absentia to 25 years in prison for murdering two people.

July 2. Dahir Ibrahim, a 31-year-old Somali migrant, was sentenced to ten years in prison for raping two women in Birmingham. He had previously been sentenced to ten years in 2005 for raping a woman in Edgbaston. A judge had ordered his deportation after he served his first sentence, but he appealed and was allowed to remain in Britain. Ibrahim’s attorney, Jabeen Akhtar, successfully argued that he had a lack of understanding of what is acceptable in the United Kingdom.

July 3. Azad Chaiwala, a Muslim entrepreneur in Manchester, launched a campaign to “remove the taboo” behind polygamy, illegal in Britain, by starting two polygamy matchmaking sites.

July 4. A Muslim man was ordered to bring his nine-year-old daughter back to Britain after taking her to Algeria and leaving her there with his relatives. The man said he did not approve of his estranged wife’s new partner, a Christian.

July 5. The Labour Party reinstated Naz Shah, a Muslim MP from Bradford who was suspended over anti-Semitic Facebook posts that called on Israelis be deported to the United States.

July 6. Abdelhadi Ahmed, 39, appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on charges of forcing his wife to wear a headscarf outside her bedroom, banning her from speaking to other men and beating her.

July 7. Sana Khan, 24, who plotted a jihadist attack on a shopping center in Westfield had her sentence reduced for “good behavior.”

July 8. Mohammed Habibullah, a 69-year-old imam who leads prayers at a mosque in Dudley, was given a suspended sentence after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman. In determining the sentence, Judge Amjad Nawaz, a fellow Muslim, said that Habibullah was a man of “positive good character.”

July 8. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of the school inspection service Ofsted, warned that the “Trojan Horse” campaign to impose radical Islamic ideas on Birmingham schools has “gone underground.” He warned that Birmingham was failing to ensure that “children are not being exposed to harm, exploitation or the risk of falling under the influence of extremist views.”

July 10. More than 1,500 children — including 257 under the age of 10 — were referred to the Channel program, the government’s deradicalization scheme, during the first six months of 2015.

July 11. A Pew Research Center survey found that more than half (52%) of Britons surveyed said they believe that incoming refugees and migrants will increase the threat of terrorism in the UK. More than half (54%) of Britons also said that Muslims in the UK “want to be distinct from the larger society.” Nearly half (46%) said that migrants are an economic burden on the UK.

July 12. Residents in Manchester received leaflets in their mail boxes calling for a public ban on dogs. The leaflets, distributed by a group called “Public Purity,” stated: “This area is home to a large Muslim community. Please have respect for us and for our children and limit the presence of dogs in the public sphere. As citizens of a multicultural nation, those who live in the UK must learn to understand and respect the legacy and lifestyle of Muslims who live alongside them.”

July 12. Gavin Rae, 36, a former soldier with the British Army and a convert to Islam, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for trying to buy weapons for the Islamic State.

July 13. Ian Acheson, the head of a review into extremism in British prisons, warned that there is a hardcore group of jihadi prisoners whose “proselytizing behavior” among the Muslim inmates in England and Wales is so dangerous that they should be separated from the rest of the prison population.

July 18. Kelvin Mackenzie, a columnist for The Sun, wrote that Fatima Manji, a presenter for Channel 4 television, should not have been allowed to anchor new reports on the jihadist attack in Nice, France, because she is a Muslim and wears the hijab. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), the press regulator, said it had received more than 300 complaints about Mackenzie’s column.

July 18. The Independent Press Standards Organisation, the press regulator, ruled that the Mail Online was wrong to use the words “Islamic honor killing” in a headline because it wrongly suggested that the crime had been motivated by Islam.

July 20. Abdi Waise, 28, an illegal immigrant from Somalia, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for kidnapping a schoolgirl and attempting to abduct four others aged between 11 and 14 in North London over the space of two-and-half hours. The crimes occurred just three weeks after Waise was released early from an eight-year prison sentence for rape. He was not deported because, according to the British government, Somalia is too dangerous.

July 21. The government reported 5,700 new cases of female genital mutilation in England between April 2015 and March 2016. The statistics, the first to be published since the government introduced compulsory reporting for public hospitals. The most frequent age at which FGM was carried out was between five and nine. More than half of all cases relate to women and girls from London.

July 23. The Home Office confirmed that 550,000 teachers, nurses, child care providers and other public sector workers have been trained in the Prevent strategy, a counter-terrorism training program, to help them spot and report potential extremists in their workplaces.

July 25. Syrian refugees sent to the remote Scottish island of Bute complained that the area is “full of old people waiting to die” and they would rather be in Glasgow or Manchester “where there are more Arabic people.”

July 26. The makers of Fireman Sam, an animated television series for children, apologized after an episode which allegedly showed a character stepping on a page of the Koran. Muslim viewers claimed the episode “Troubled Waters” was Islamophobic because it showed a bumbling character named Elvis failing to respect the Muslim holy book.

July 26. The Home Office announced a £2.4 million ($3.2 million) “Hate Crime Action Fund” to “provide security measures and equipment for vulnerable places of worship that need increased protection.” The plan promises extra data collection and training to identify “anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist and other bullying in schools.”

July 26. Two men of “Middle Eastern appearance” tried to abduct a serviceman at knifepoint at RAF Marham in Norfolk. The serviceman managed to fight off his attackers. Air Force personnel were warned to “keep a low profile” and told not wear their uniforms in public.

July 28. The BBC reported that five books regarded as “extremist” remained in jails in England and Wales after a review called for their removal. The banned titles were The Way of Jihad by Hassan Al-Banna; Milestones by Sayyid Qutb; The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi; Towards Understanding Islam by Syed Abul Ala Maududi; and Fundamentals of Tauheed by Bilal Philips.

July 29. A Muslim street preacher in Birmingham was charged with public order offenses after he tried to enforce Sharia law on female passersby. Krissoni Henderson, 31, was arrested for allegedly shouting verbal abuse at a 38-year-old woman “for wearing tight jeans.”

AUGUST 2016

August 1. Nearly 900 Syrians in Britain were arrested in 2015 for crimes including rape and child abuse, police statistics revealed. The British government has pledged to resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees in the UK by the end of 2020. “The government seems not to have vetted those it has invited into the country,” said MEP Ray Finch.

August 1. Male refugees settling in Britain must receive formal training on how to treat women, a senior Labour MP said. Thangam Debbonaire, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees, called for a “refugee integration strategy” so that men “understand what is expected of them.” She said it could help prevent sexual harassment and issues “including genital mutilation.”

August 3. Zakaria Bulhan, a 19-year-old Norwegian man of Somali descent, stabbed to death an American woman in London’s Russell Square. He also wounded five others. Police said Bulhan was mentally ill, but HeatStreet, a news and opinion website, revealed that he had uploaded books advocating violent jihad on social media sites.

August 4. A public swimming pool in Luton announced gender-segregated sessions for “cultural reasons.” The gender-segregated sessions are named ‘Alhamdulillahswimming,’ an Arabic phrase which means “Praise be to Allah.”

August 5. Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood may be allowed to seek asylum in Britain, according to new guidance from the Home Office. The new guidance contradicted previous government policy, which stated that Britain would “refuse visas to members and associates of the Muslim Brotherhood who are on record as having made extremist comments.”

August 5. Stephen Bennett, a 39-year-old father of seven from Manchester, was sentenced to 180 hours of community service for posting “grossly offensive” anti-Muslim comments on Facebook. One of the offending comments: “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.” He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act.

August 9. Tanveer Ahmed, a 32-year-old taxi driver from Bradford, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for the “barbaric, premeditated” murder of a shopkeeper in Glasgow. Ahmed, a Sunni Muslim, admitted to repeatedly stabbing Asad Shah to death outside his shop in March 2016 in a sectarian attack motivated by hatred of Shah’s religious views. Shah belonged to the Ahmadi branch of Islam, which believes Mohammed was not the final Muslim prophet.

August 11. Kadiza Sultana, one of three British schoolgirls who left their homes in east London to join the Islamic State, was killed by a Russian airstrike in Raqqa, Syria.

August 11. Muslim women are the most economically disadvantaged group in British society, according to a report by the House of Commons. The report also found that jobless rates in the Muslim community run at more than double the rate of the general population.

August 12. Voter fraud has been deliberately overlooked in Muslim communities because of “political correctness,” according to a government report. The investigation began after a scandal in Tower Hamlets, London, where Mayor Lutfur Rahman was removed and his election declared void after he was found by a court to have committed electoral fraud, including vote-rigging.

August 13. British schoolchildren should be required to make a regular US-style pledge of allegiance to the British flag, according to Khalil Yousuf, a spokesman for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. He said: “Not only should we raise the flag, but everybody in the Muslim community should have to pledge loyalty to Britain in schools. There is no conflict between being a Muslim and a Briton.”

August 14. London Police announced a £1.7 million “Online Hate Crime Hub” to investigate offensive comments on Facebook and Twitter. The so-called Twitter Squad, created by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, will identify online abuse and report it to the appropriate police force. Civil liberties groups worry the new unit could stop people expressing opinions for fear of arrest.

August 20. A British asylum judge revealed that only a tiny proportion — between five and ten percent — of the people whose asylum applications are denied are actually deported.

August 22. The Justice Ministry announced measures to combat Islamic extremism in British prisons. The move came after an official inquiry concluded that inmates acting as “self-styled emirs” were exerting a “radicalizing influence” over fellow Muslims.

August 23. Scottish Police announced that the hijab will become an optional part of its uniform. The move was aimed at encouraging more Muslim women to join the force.

August 24. Michael Coe, a 35-year-old convert to Islam and a close associate of Anjem Choudary, was found guilty of assault and battery after knocking a 16-year-old boy unconscious in East London because he was hugging a girl. Coe, also known as Mikaeel Ibrahim, left the boy unconscious and bleeding after kicking his head.

August 26. The BBC reported that the number of minors detained under the Terrorism Act more than tripled over two years. Forty-six were detained in 2015, compared to 13 in 2013, with the youngest aged only 13. The threefold rise is believed to be the result of police stopping unaccompanied minors on outbound flights to Syria.

August 27. A close associate of Anjem Choudary ran a series of front companies that received more than £1 million of taxpayers’ money to run computer training courses in libraries and job centers. That money was then transferred to key members of Choudary’s banned Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun (ALM). Even after the government learned about the associate’s links to Choudary, it continued to grant him money for another four years.

August 27. Police in Telford — dubbed the child sex capital of Britain — were accused of covering up allegations that hundreds of children in the town were sexually exploited by Pakistani sex gangs.

August 31. A YouGov poll found that a majority of Britons favor a burka ban: 57% support a ban; 25% are opposed. The only age group to oppose a ban was 18-24 year-olds; by contrast, the 65+ group supported a ban 78% to 12%.

August 31. National Churchwatch, a multi-faith organization dedicated to reducing crime in places of worship, issued a security warning for British churches after jihadists murdered a Catholic priest in France. The group sent a 12-page security guidance — Counter Terrorism Advice for Churches — to every church in Britain.

SEPTEMBER 2016

September 2. An official list of the most popular baby names in England and Wales in 2015 showed the top name as Oliver. The list shows Muhammad at number 12, followed by Mohammed at 29, Mohammad at 68 and Muhammed coming in at 121. When the different spellings of Mohammed are combined, however, the name was used 7,570 times, outstripping the 6,941 babies named Oliver on their birth certificates.

September 2. Ayasofia Primary School, a Muslim school in Whitechapel, East London, was shut down by Ofsted, the agency that regulates schools, after four inspections uncovered a raft of educational failings.

September 4. Peter Sutcliffe, a serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was “preparing to convert to Islam” in a bid to protect himself as part of Muslim prison gang, according to media reports. Sutcliffe, 70, was moved from the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital to Frankland prison after a tribunal found he no longer required medical treatment. Sutcliffe, who was convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven more, has faced daily death threats since arriving at the prison. Muslim gang members offered to protect him, but only if he converts to Islam.

September 6. Anjem Choudary, 49, one of the most notorious Islamists in Britain, and a top associate, Mohammed Rahman, 33, were sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for inviting support for a proscribed terrorist organization, namely the Islamic State. Choudary, a lawyer by training, had for years managed to avoid prison by treading the fine legal line between the inflammatory rhetoric of Islamic supremacism and the right to free speech. The judge said he crossed the line by pledging an “oath of allegiance” to the Islamic State.

September 7. The government should impose financial restrictions on Islamists in order to control how they spend their money, according to Tom Keating, an expert in financial crime. The recommendation came after a judge revealed that Anjem Choudary had obtained £500,000 (€550,000; $610,000) in welfare benefits.

September 7. The BBC reported a sharp increase in the number of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Britain. The number of asylum seeking children in the care of English councils rose 62% in a year. The largest group are boys aged 16 and 17, coming from countries such as Afghanistan or Eritrea.

September 8. Haroon Ali-Syed, 19, of Hounslow, West London, was arrested on suspicion of planning to carry out a mass-casualty terror attack on key London landmarks, including Buckingham Palace.

September 9. Four members of an alleged Muslim terror gang appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on charges of intending to commit a terrorist act in Britain. Police searching a car linked to the group found a meat cleaver with the word “kaffir” (unbeliever) carved on the handle. They also recovered guns and bullets in a bag found in the car.

September 9. David Thompson, the head of West Midlands Police, one of the largest police forces in Britain, said he would consider allowing Muslim officers to wear the burka while on duty in a bid to boost diversity.

September 11. A former counterterrorism sergeant accused London’s Metropolitan Police of failing to tackle extremist views among some of its Muslim officers because of a fear of being labelled “Islamophobic.”

September 12. Ofcom, the media regulator, said it would not investigate complaints over an episode of the children’s program Fireman Sam, which Muslims said showed one of Sam’s mates trampling on a page of the Koran. Ofcom, which received 170 complaints, said it could not confirm the page was from the Islamic holy book.

September 14. A woman who teaches English to migrants with refugee status said her students are not interested in learning the language or getting a job, but rather in the benefits they can extract from British taxpayers.

September 15. The British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Simon Collis, completed the Hajj after converting to Islam. He is believed to be the first British ambassador to perform the pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam.

September 16. Britain will receive around 43,381 asylum applications in 2016, costing over £620 million, according to projections by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

September 16. The Guardian reported that young Muslims living in Rochdale are increasingly turning to anti-Western sentiment and extreme interpretations of Islam. Muslim leaders interviewed by the paper described a “disturbing trend” of young Muslims adopting more fundamentalist beliefs on key social and political issues than their parents or grandparents.

September 17. Islamic State supporter Mohammed Syeedy, 21, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Jalal Uddin, a 71-year-old imam at the Jalalia Jame mosque in Rochdale. Manchester Crown Court heard how Syeedy developed “a hatred” of Uddin for practicing Ruqya, a form of religious healing which involves the use of amulets and considered by the Islamic State to be punishable by death.

September 21. Alex Younger, the head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency, warned that globalization, the information revolution, a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and failed states would ensure that Islamist terrorism remained a threat to the West for years to come.

September 28. Noor Walile, a 38-year-old imam at Rugby Mosque, Warwickshire, was sentenced to six years in prison for raping a boy in a toilet in between a lesson he was giving at the mosque.

September 28. Home Office statistics released to the Daily Express under Freedom of Information laws revealed that 12,000 migrants seeking asylum in the UK are missing. The data showed that of the 77,440 asylum cases in progress, one in six skipped their first interview with immigration officers and vanished.

September 28. A government report found that Muslims are the least likely of all faith groups in Wales to be employed. The report, “Creating a Faith-Friendly Workplace for Muslims,” encouraged employers to adopt Sharia standards — providing prayer rooms, having flextime to enable staff to leave early for Friday prayers, and serving halal or vegetarian food in canteens — to attract Muslim staff.

September 28. The Charity Commission, the independent regulator of charities in England and Wales, opened an inquiry into the Stockwell Green Mosque for distributing literature that calls on members of the Ahmadi community to be killed. The leaflets demanded that Ahmadis should convert to mainstream Islam or face “a capital sentence.”

OCTOBER 2016

October 2. The Daily Mail reported that dozens of Islamic schools continue to operate despite inspectors finding that pupils are unsafe, exposed to extreme views or unaware of basic British values. The findings suggested that a government crackdown on extremism in schools has been ineffective.

October 5. Manchester Crown Court sentenced Imran Khan, 38, to life in prison for murdering his wife. He admitted to stabbing her in the presence of their five children because it was “not halal” for her to be working with other men.

October 7. Police launched a hate crime probe after literature saying those who insult Islam “must be killed” was allegedly handed out at a mosque in Walthamstow, East London.

October 8. A baggage handler at an unidentified British airport had an ISIS flag stitched to the inside of his glove. The discovery raised the prospect that staff at British airports could be operating as part of a jihadi sleeper cell.

October 11. The McAuley Catholic High School in Doncaster received an online threat: “We have our sights set on you, and by Allah we will kill every single infidel student at this school #McAuleySchoolMassacre”.

October 13. A Muslim bus driver stopped his vehicle in the middle of a busy road in Portsmouth for 10 minutes while he conducted his daily prayer. Some 50 children, parents and teachers from Meon Junior School in Southsea were returning home from a school trip to London when the incident happened. Parents said the driver put the lives of their children at risk.

October 13. ITV aired a new documentary, “Exposure: Islam’s Non-Believers,” which focused on the risks to Muslims who abandon their religion. A former Muslim told the documentary makers: “I remember saying to my mum, I don’t believe in God any more. And her saying, ‘you can’t tell anybody else because they’ll kill you, we are obliged to kill ex-Muslims.’ And that it would put me at extreme risk if anybody else was to find out, so that conversation ended there.”

October 18. A gang of Iranian men in Chelmsford sexually exploited and groomed vulnerable girls by supplying them with drugs and offering them free pizza. All three victims were allegedly targeted by the group which “farmed them out like cattle” to other men.

October 18. Nearly two-thirds of “child refugees” who claimed to be minors were found to be adults. Figures show that in the year to September 2015, 65% of the child refugees who had their age disputed were found to be over 18.

October 22. A 19-year-old “Asian” was arrested after police found a bomb on a train in the London Underground. The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre raised the threat level for transport in London to severe: an attack is highly likely.

October 22. A foster mother who took in a “child refugee” discovered that he was a 21-year-old jihadist. Rosie welcomed Jamal into her family after social workers said he was a 12-year-old orphan who had fled Afghanistan. Alarm bells rang when the family went swimming and Rosie’s 13-year-old commented on how hairy Jamal was. His last words to Rosie were: “I’ll kill you and I know where your children are.”

October 27. A man and woman, both aged 35, were arrested at Luton Airport on suspicion of terror offenses. The pair were attempting to travel to Syria.

October 30. The Sunday Times reported that the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, a prominent Sharia court, was “sabotaging” criminal proceedings to protect alleged perpetrators of domestic violence against women.

October 30. More than 25,000 signed a petition asking the government to allow public calls to prayer at least three times a day in areas with a high Muslim population. The petition stated:

“The adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, is an integral part of the Muslim faith. The number of people practicing the religion of Islam in the United Kingdom exceeds three million. Some neighborhood towns have more than 50% Muslim population. I believe it is the right time to … allow highly Muslim populated areas with a loud call for prayer at least three times a day.”

October 31. A “child refugee” from Afghanistan who was sent to Britain from the Calais Jungle camp in France claimed he was 16 but actually was 22. According to the law, unless a person who is seeking asylum appears to be “significantly” over the age of 18 they should be “afforded the benefit of the doubt and treated as children.”

NOVEMBER 2016

November 1. Sharia law courts are operating “everywhere in the country,” according to Ahmad Al-Dubayan, chairman of UK Board of Sharia Councils, a body set up to standardize the administration of Islamic law in the UK. He said it was impossible to know how many Sharia courts are operating in Britain.

November 4. Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, said that Britons have much to learn from the “vibrancy of the Muslim faith” of the refugees and migrants arriving in the United Kingdom.

November 4. Nissar Hussain, a convert to Christianity, was forced to flee his home in Manningham after being subjected to harassment and violence by Muslims. “This extreme persecution by certain people in the Muslim community because we are converts has broken us as a family,” he said. Hussain, a 50-year-old father of six, said that his family and he have endured a life of harassment, intimidation and fear at the hands of Muslim hardliners since 2008, when they appeared in a Channel 4 documentary about the mistreatment of Muslim converts.

November 7. Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is failing to prosecute honor crimes for fear of causing “unrest” in Asian communities, a Scotland Yard whistleblower alleged. He disclosed that “apathy” by prosecutors led to the collapse of what could have been the first conviction for forced marriage in England.

November 11. CPS failed to pursue a case involving an Asian woman whose family forced her to have an abortion, for fear of being labelled racist. It could have been the first conviction for sex-selective abortion, but CPS dropped the case amid fears of “political correctness.”

November 14. Sharia courts are ordering women to stay with abusive husbands, a rape victim told the House of Commons. The mother-of-two revealed that she had been beaten, robbed and raped by her estranged husband despite British courts having banned him from approaching her. But family pressure persuaded the British-Pakistani to try and obtain an Islamic divorce in a Sharia court. Expecting to be treated sympathetically, she was instead told to return to her violent husband.

November 16. Bedfordshire Police deleted Twitter posts about Islamophobia Awareness Month after users pointed out its logo was similar to a hand gesture popular with ISIS jihadis.

November 20. The National Health Service referred 420 patients and staff to police in England and Wales between July 2015 and June 2016 over concerns they were at risk of radicalization. Statistics show an average of 35 referrals a month, up from 21 a month the previous year.

November 24. The jihadists suspected of carrying out the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels used British benefits payments to fund their crimes. Kingston Crown Court heard how some of the most notorious and wanted terrorists in Europe had used British taxpayers’ money to fund their activities in Syria and elsewhere.

November 26. More than half of asylum seekers surveyed about the quality of taxpayer-funded housing they have been provided branded it as “completely inadequate.” Just 11% of people asked said the housing was excellent, 8% described it as good, and 14% said it was adequate.

November 28. Tareena Shakil, a woman from Burton who became the first female from the UK to be jailed for joining the Islamic State, received more than £132,000 in taxpayer-funded legal aid to pay for her defense.

DECEMBER 2016

December 5. A government-commissioned report recommended that migrants should swear an oath of allegiance as soon as they arrive in the UK. It said that Muslims living in the UK are increasingly identifying with a global Islamic “Ummah” (community), rather than with being British.

December 10. An asylum seeker described as the “very model of a modern al-Qaeda terrorist” was allowed to stay in Britain despite being jailed for plotting attacks in the country. The “sleeper agent” jihadist was about to be deported back to his native Jordan. But Home Secretary Amber Rudd changed her mind after the man’s lawyers argued that he would be tortured.

December 12. Six people were arrested in Derby, Burton on Trent and London on suspicion of preparing an act of terrorism. Counter-terrorism investigators said they disrupted what they believe was a “significant plot” to attack the UK that was inspired by the Islamic State.

December 13. The Black Health Initiative in Leeds warned that girls are being taken to female genital mutilation (FGM) “parties” in cities across England. The charity said that midwives from Africa are being flown into the country to carry out the illegal practice. West Yorkshire Police said they were aware girls were being subjected to FGM locally.

December 15. More than £600,000 (€700,000; $738,000) of taxpayers’ money is being spent every week so lawyers can give free legal advice to asylum seekers. A total of 38,005 cases were approved for free legal advice over the last financial year, often in cases where the applicant was fighting a decision where their asylum claim had already been denied.

December 17. More than 1,000 Muslims took to the streets of London chanting “Allahu Akbar” and demanding an Islamic caliphate. They gathered outside the empty Syrian embassy in Belgrave Square, London to protest American policies regarding Aleppo, the largest city in Syria.

December 20. Heavily-armed police officers were deployed to Canterbury Cathedral to guard the nativity scene against possible jihadist attacks.

December 21. Police in Bristol increased patrols in the city center due to concerns about “Islamophobia” in the wake of the Berlin terror attack.

December 23. Syed Hoque, 37, of Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted of two counts of funding terrorism. He used aid convoys to Syria to send thousands of pounds to his extremist nephew who was fighting alongside al-Qaeda.

December 24. Munir Hassan Mohammed, 35, and Rowaida El-Hassan, 32, appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on charges of making explosives. Mohammed, an Eritrean who is seeking asylum in the UK, was also charged with being a member of the Islamic State.

December 25. The main course for inmates at HMP Bristol prison for Christmas dinner was halal chicken. Other prisons across the country also served halal options for Christmas. HMP Birmingham offered halal beef.

December 26. Sixty children are referred to the government’s Prevent counter-terrorism program each week. In 2015/16, there were around 7,500 referrals, a rate of 20 a day. Of those, 3,100 were aged under 18, and 61 were under the age of ten.