As Ramadan begins, Muslims across Britain prepare for a month of fasting, reflection and charity. For most of us, it is a time of spiritual discipline and generosity. For too many of us, it is also a time when the drumbeat of anti-Muslim hatred grows louder.

I have never liked the word “Islamophobia”. It sounds abstract, almost clinical. What we are dealing with is not a vague fear. It is hostility. Suspicion. Discrimination. Abuse. So, I call it what it is, anti-Muslim hatred.

Not a day passes without some overt expression of it in our national life. A crime committed by one Muslim becomes an indictment of all Muslims. A cultural practice is wrenched from context and weaponised to provoke anxiety. A theological concept is distorted to imply threat. And on the streets, and increasingly online, it can turn into violence, intimidation or exclusion directed at anyone who “looks” Muslim.

I have lived this contradiction personally. No one calls me the Muslim chancellor of the University of Manchester. No one describes me as the Muslim chair of the Church of England’s safeguarding panel. When I am chair of The Lowry, my faith is rarely considered relevant.

But when I was chief prosecutor for north-west England, suddenly I became the “Muslim prosecutor”. When I took on grooming gangs and secured justice where others had failed, I was the “Muslim” decision-maker. I remember being introduced to the great and the good in New York by Niall Ferguson as “the Muslim prosecutor that prosecutes Muslims”. When........

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