A numbered list of statistics circulating on social media shows that Muslims have taken over Britain's cities, courts and welfare system

It does not look like a rumour

The thing arrives as a screenshot. A numbered list, plain text on a plain background, no byline, no publication, no links. So many mosques. So many sharia courts. Nine cities with Muslim mayors. A percentage of Muslim women who do not work.

Rumours announce themselves. They have adjectives and exclamation marks and a friend of a friend. This has none of that, and the absence is the point: a column of figures reads as the residue of somebody’s research, the part left over after the opinions were removed.

It is an anti-Muslim artifact, and this page says so in its own voice rather than leaving it to be inferred. What it does is convert a population of British citizens into an inventory of encroachments. But the reason it is worth a page of its own is not that it is hostile. Plenty of hostile things are also obviously false. This one has been publicly dismantled at least three times and keeps coming back with the numbers unchanged, and understanding why requires looking at how the numbers were made.

Mostly real numbers, with the warnings taken off

Start with the mosques, because it is the clearest case. The list says there are over 3,000.

The Office for National Statistics does not count places of worship, so there is no official number to be wrong about. What exists is a database kept by the organisation Muslims in Britain, and in February 2026 that database listed 3,354 locations. So the figure in the list is not conjured from nothing. It is sitting right there.

What the list leaves out is everything the compilers say about their own total. That 3,354 includes roughly 400 addresses that are now defunct, about 50 multi-faith spaces, and 75 entries the database itself describes as very uncertain. The same organisation states the number of actual mosques at about 1,700, and counts 1,850 once prayer rooms, hired halls and chaplaincies are included. For comparison, the government estimated 1,500 mosques and prayer halls in England in 2018, and the Muslim Council of Britain said about 1,200 in Britain in 2020.

So the claim is a real database’s raw row count with the database’s own footnotes removed. That is a different operation from lying, and it is more robust, because a reader who goes looking will find a real source with a matching number and stop there.

The past tense, quietly deleted

The mayors claim works by a second method. It names nine places: London, Birmingham, Leeds, Blackburn, Sheffield, Oxford, Luton, Oldham and Rochdale, and says all of them have Muslim mayors.

Full Fact’s answer is that all nine have had a Muslim mayor at some point, and that only some of them do at any given moment. In February 2025 the count was four: London, Rochdale, Oldham and Luton, with no evidence for the other five. By the 2026 check the specifics had moved again, and Full Fact could point at Oldham’s mayor Pam Byrne, who appears to have served as a church warden, and at Oxford’s, described as a regular attender at church functions.

Note what this required. Nobody had to invent a city. The list is assembled from things that were each true once, collapsed into a single present tense, in a country where the office of mayor turns over annually in most places and where nobody records the religion of the holder anyway.

The sharia figures fail differently again, and more simply. There are no sharia courts in Britain; sharia councils have no legal jurisdiction and cannot override English law. The Home Office estimated 30 to 85 councils in England and Wales in 2018 and said there is no official count. The list reports 130 courts and 50-plus councils, which is both above that range and a division of one thing into two so it can be counted twice.

The quietest number is the one doing the damage

The line about population looks like the least contentious thing on the sheet: four million Muslims out of 66 million people.

The four million is roughly right. The 2021 census recorded 3.8 million people identifying as Muslim in England. The 66 million is not right for anywhere. England’s population is around 57.7 million; the UK’s is closer to 70 million. Whichever the list means, it has the wrong figure, and because it is the denominator, every proportion built on it inherits the error.

The welfare claim is the one that matters most and it is the one furthest from the record. The sheet says 78% of Muslim women and 63% of Muslim men neither work nor support themselves. The 2021 census puts 49% of adult Muslims in employment; Full Fact’s earlier check gives 37% of Muslim adult women in work and 51.4% of all Muslims of working age. And not working is not the same as claiming benefits: the category holds students, carers, the retired and the long-term sick. Religion is not recorded on benefit claims at all, so the specific thing the sheet asserts is not merely wrong but unmeasurable. Separately, 27% of Muslim households in England and Wales live in social housing.

Who pays for it

The corrections are worth carrying away individually, because each one is a fact rather than a posture. Around 1,700 mosques, not over 3,000. No sharia courts at all, and 30 to 85 councils with no legal power. Four of nine mayors at last count, in an office that changes hands every year and does not record religion. Roughly half of working-age Muslims in employment, not a fifth. A denominator that is out by millions.

What the list is for is worth stating too. It does not argue for a policy. It has no author to hold to anything, no conclusion written down, and no request. What it does is establish a background feeling: that a group of British people is not a part of the country but a quantity arriving in it. Everything after that is left to the reader, which is precisely why it can be shared by people who would never put their own name to the sentence it implies.

The people described in it are around four million citizens, and the page they are reduced to has no author, no evidence, and a four-year record of surviving every attempt to correct it. That is the story here. Not that someone made up some numbers, but that a set of mostly real figures, stripped of the qualifications that gave them meaning, has proved more durable than any of the work done to fix it.