Misleading ‘fact’ sheet about UK Muslims recirculates

A post making a number of claims about Muslims in the UK is being shared again on social media.

But as we’ve explained several times before, several of the claims are wrong, unevidenced or unlikely to be true given the information we have.

The post claims the mayors of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Blackburn, Sheffield, Oxford, Luton, Oldham and Rochdale are all Muslim.

The religion of mayors is not a matter of public record. Although all of these locations have had Muslim mayors at some point in the past, there is no evidence all of their current mayors are Muslim. Some of the current mayors of the listed cities do identify as Muslim, but not all. For example, the current mayor of Oldham Pam Byrne appears to have been a church warden, while the mayor of Oxford has been described as a “regular attender at church functions”.

The post also claims there are over 3,000 mosques, but we don’t know exactly how many there are. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) does not count how many mosques (or other places of worship) there are in the UK.

In February 2026, the organisation Muslims in Britain, which keeps a database of mosques, said there are 1,850 mosques (or masjids), prayer rooms and shared places “such as hired halls and chaplaincies” in the UK and Ireland. It said there are “about 1,700 actual mosques”.

It lists 3,354 “locations” in total, but says that includes “75 very uncertain, 50 multi-faith, and about 400 now defunct addresses”. It’s not clear what the remaining 1,000 or so locations refer to.

In 2020, the Muslim Council of Britain said there were “about 1,200 mosques” in Britain, while in 2018 the government estimated that there were “1,500 mosques and prayer halls in England”.

Sharia courts and “no-go” areas

The post also claims there are over 130 “Sharia Courts” and over 50 “Sharia Councils”.

Sharia councils, also known as courts, are usually a group of local religious scholars who advise on issues of Islamic marriage and divorce, in accordance with Islamic religious rules.

They are not formal courts of law and have “no legal status and no legal binding authority under civil law”, according to a 2018 Home Office review, which estimated that there were between 30 and 85 such councils in England and Wales and none in Scotland.

Another claim included in the post is that there are “Muslims-Only No-Go Areas Across the UK”.

While it’s not clear exactly what this means, as we’ve explained before, there is no evidence of geographical areas that exclude individuals on the basis of religion. And there are no areas in the UK where UK law doesn’t apply or where police can’t do their work (except perhaps diplomatic premises).

Benefits and housing

The post claims: “Muslim women…78% don’t work and are on free benefits/housing. Muslim men…63% don’t work and are on free benefits/housing.”

It’s not clear what time period these figures refer to. But according to 2021 census data for England and Wales, just under half (48.6%) of adults who identified as Muslim were in employment. The census said 37% of Muslim women and 59.9% of Muslim men were employed, figures which are inconsistent with those given in the Facebook post.

The ONS says it does not hold data that breaks down benefit claimants by religion. But according to the 2021 census 27% of households where the “household reference person” was Muslim lived in social housing. Social housing doesn’t mean that it is free housing, however.

Halal meat in schools

The penultimate claim in the post says that “all UK schools are only serving Halal meat”.

That’s not correct. Government rules on school food in England don’t specify that food which meets religious dietary requirements must be served. Individual schools may choose to provide halal meat if they wish, but there’s no obligation for all schools to do so.

The post ends by stating: “all this achieved by just 4 million Muslims out of the 66 million population!”

That’s about right. The most recent data for England and Wales (from the 2021 census) shows there were about 3.9 million Muslims out of a population of 59.6 million.

In Northern Ireland, 10,870 said they were Muslim in the 2021 census, while 119,872 people in Scotland said they were Muslim in the 2022 census. Altogether, it therefore seems likely that there are about 4 million Muslims in the UK in total.

Religion is an optional question on the England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland censuses, so there is some uncertainty about the figures.

The UK population was estimated to be around 66 million in 2017, but the latest estimate put this at 69.5 million in 2025.