
“Leicester has become the poster city for multicultural Britain, a place where the stunning number and size of the minorities – the 55 mosques, 18 Hindu temples, nine Sikh gurudwaras, two synagogues, two Buddhist centres and one Jain centre – are seen not as a recipe for conflict or a millstone around the city’s neck, but a badge of honour,” was how, in 2013, the British liberal newspaper The Independent celebrated the transformation of Britain’s tenth-largest city.
There are places in Europe that visited the future sooner than others: Malmö in Sweden, Trappes and Roubaix in France, Cologne in Germany, Molenbeek in Belgium, Leicester in England…


Imagine that you are a U.S. immigration officer, handing out green cards to the would-be Americans of the world. You have before you two applicants who look almost completely the same; for some arcane, unspecified bureaucratic reason, you can only approve one of them. They’re both well-educated by American standards, both bringing identical families, both passed their background checks.





Attention has focused on the recent defacing of a Hindu temple in Toronto and a nearby statue of Mahatma Gandhi with pro-independence graffiti.
