What was claimed
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said people should learn Arabic.
Our verdict
We’ve found no evidence of Sadiq Khan saying this.
No evidence Sadiq Khan said people should ‘create harmony by learning Arabic’
14 February 2023
An image shared widely on social media, including to Facebook, claims that Mayor of London Sadiq Khan called on people to “learn Arabic”.
The post says: “The London Mayor says we should create harmony by learning Arabic. He wants us to learn more about Muslims, their religion, and accept their culture.”
It also features an explicit phrase written in a font intended to mimic the Arabic script.
Full Fact has contacted the Mayor’s office to ask whether Mr Khan made any such comments, and will update this piece if we receive a response. But we’ve not found any evidence that he called on people in London, or the UK more broadly, to learn Arabic in order to “create harmony”.
Mr Khan has previously been reported to have said that, rather than translating official documents into various foreign languages, he “would rather get people to learn English”.
We’ve written a number of articles previously about various social media claims about Mr Khan as part of our work fact checking online misinformation.
Image courtesy of US Embassy London
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because we’ve found no evidence of Sadiq Khan saying people should learn Arabic.