At the beginning of this month, Mr Orbán said: “I think we have a right to decide that we don’t want to have a large number of Muslim people in our country.” Mr Orbán was fiercely attacked for the motives behind his remark. I do not know enough about Hungarian politics to say whether such attacks are justified. But, regardless of the precise facts about Mr Orbán, 

I would guess most people in western – let alone eastern – Europe would quietly agree with his general proposition. One of the biggest anxieties about the current immigration is its high Muslim element. Is it wrong to have such an anxiety, let alone to express it publicly, let alone to want to have a system of immigration based on it?

But in my dealings with British Muslim leaders and representatives for this work, and in other contacts at this time, I became uneasy. There were several unattractive things I noticed. One was the exclusion of women from any role in governance, thought or worship. Another was an absolutism about the Israel-Palestine issue which involved, in many cases, an unmistakable hostility to Jews.

A third was an assumption that something that was considered bad – blasphemy, immodesty, homosexuality, mixed bathing – should be banned. The idea that one could disapprove of something, and yet believe that it should be permitted, seemed barely to exist.Many favoured sharia law trumping British law. They would not support Muslim membership of the Armed Forces if those forces were deployed against Muslim countries.

They wanted it to be illegal to attack Islam, let alone denigrate its prophet; and they waged constant “lawfare” to try to silence their critics. They tended, I thought, to see the advance of their cause as a zero-sum game in which the authorities had to cede more ground (sometimes it is literally a matter of territory) to Muslims.