London, United Kingdom – Suspended beneath a 536-year-old Islamic-inspired Spanish ceiling in east London, three tapestries connect the capital’s Muslim communities to the broader historical narrative of Islam in Europe.
Created by artist Shahed Saleem, the collection features imagery from the British Home Office’s 2013 “Hostile Environment” policy—which urged undocumented immigrants to self-deport—alongside scenes of Muslim shoppers at London’s vibrant Queen’s Market and a portrait of Altab Ali, a young Bangladeshi man murdered in a racially motivated attack.
The collection, titled I Was Born Here, is described by Saleem—an architect, author, and academic—as “a story of migration and of belonging.”
Seated on cushions beneath the ornate ceiling, Saleem invited visitors to view and discuss his exhibition.
Saleem positioned the works against a backdrop of rising xenophobia, highlighted recently by the electoral victories of the anti-immigrant Reform UK party and racist riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
“While creating the work, I witnessed escalating racial politics and a hostile climate directed against individuals representing migration and immigration,” Saleem told Al Jazeera.
![Shahed Saleem, an artist, architect and academic, sits under the Islamic-inspired Spanish roof which originated from the central Spanish town of Torrijos [Courtesy of David Parry]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==)
The Themes Remain Alive
In 2024, the Victoria and Albert Museum approached Saleem to create an exhibit for their new Stratford venue, the V&A East Storehouse. The installation responds to both the local community and the Torrijos ceiling—a carved and gilded wooden masterpiece measuring 6 by 6 metres (20 x 20 feet) that originated from a palace in the central Spanish town of Torrijos.
This undertaking required hundreds of hours to produce the three monumental tapestries.
The first tapestry, titled Home Office, features verbatim quotes from government signage displayed across diverse London neighborhoods. The 2013 language reflected intimidation tactics—such as “106 ARRESTS LAST WEEK IN YOUR AREA,” “In the UK Illegally?” and “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST”—and is now woven into the fabric against a backdrop of Alhambra patterns, a form of Islamic geometric art rooted in medieval Spain.
Another panel honors Altab Ali, a textile worker who was fatally stabbed in a racially motivated attack in 1978 at the age of 24.
The collection also includes an image depicting the voyage of the Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus’s vessel funded by the Spanish monarchy, which marked the beginning of Spain’s colonization of the so-called “New World” in 1492.
During the 1400s, despite centuries of religious coexistence in Spain, the Spanish Inquisition began violently targeting Jewish and Muslim communities.
“While frequently celebrated as the dawn of Spain’s Golden Age, this period also ushered in one of Europe’s most devastating programs of religious and ethnic homogenisation,” said Tharik Hussain, historian, travel writer, and author of Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History.
“In the centuries that followed—and in the period leading up to it—hundreds of thousands of European Muslims and Jews were forced into exile, compelled to convert, or driven from their homes. Meanwhile, countless others endured persecution, imprisonment, and death in a desperate attempt to erase communities that had been indigenous to the peninsula for centuries.”
Hussain noted that throughout history, “Christian Europe” has admired and occasionally preserved the “artistic achievements of Europe’s Islamic civilisation,” but too often marginalized, excluded, and persecuted Muslim communities.
Reflecting on the exhibit, 26-year-old visitor Hana remarked, “Although the stories are rooted in the past, the themes remain alive in today’s public.”
“It is deeply ironic that the roof is presented alongside the tapestry’s depiction of hostility and the uncomfortable realities of migration,” she added.
She pointed to the irony in Europe’s longstanding fascination and orientalization of Islamic art and people, which exists alongside growing Islamophobia. In just the past year, Islamic art has fetched record-setting prices at London auction houses while anti-Muslim crimes continue to terrorize communities.
For Saleem, histories are deliberately interwoven.
“Colonization abroad and the creation of ethno-nationalism at home became constituent parts of the modern European nation, a reality that continues today,” he explained.
Elsewhere in the exhibit, a coat of arms depicts The Bell Hotel and the Britannia Hotel, both of which have been used to house asylum seekers. Last July, hundreds of far-right protesters attempted to storm The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, and at least three of them were convicted of violent disorder earlier this month.
Another tapestry is vibrantly lively, depicting a bustling crowd of market-goers at Newham’s Queen’s Market, an iconic publicly owned market that locals have recently fought to protect from corporate development.
“I felt that these are the people most impacted by the legislation and timing we are witnessing,” Saleem told Al Jazeera. “But they also represent a multicultural Britain and a process of arriving, settling, creativity, labor, and life. This piece shows the richness of the city that is under threat.”
I Was Born Here: A Defensive Statement in the Face of Hostility
For 25-year-old Imran Haque, the exhibit offers more than artistic and political commentary; it speaks directly to his family’s personal history.
“I Was Born Here manifests the very real, tangible, and honest truth that I, along with thousands of other British Muslims, were indeed born here,” Haque told Al Jazeera. During the 1970s, Haque’s mother and her friends, as young Bangladeshi newcomers to London, shopped for fabrics at the very marketplace where Saleem sourced his textiles.
Underlying Saleem’s work is a challenge to ethno-nationalist thought that frames Muslim immigrants as foreign and non-British.
The histories of the Alhambra and the roof itself nod to Islam’s enduring presence in Europe for centuries, while the exhibition’s title satirizes a phrase Muslim and non-white Londoners are often forced to repeat.
“It is something we had to use to justify our existence here in England and counter racist attacks,” Saleem explained to Al Jazeera. “It is part of a parody of having to continuously claim one’s space in a palace where one actually belongs.”
The works immediately catch the eye upon entering the first floor of the Storehouse, occupying a massive amount of space with their bright colors and sheer scale.
The significance is not lost on onlookers like Haque, who noted that the work’s prominence in the gallery “has allowed me to feel free to occupy space with my history and story.”
“Muslims are not a strange or foreign concept,” he stated. “The religion has been present on these shores since the 16th century, and the pieces serve as a reminder that faith has no borders.”
To Saleem, I Was Born Here is not merely a political commentary or a series of artworks—it is an artefact. “We are in a historical moment, and the work acts as a marker of that era,” Saleem said, viewing the pieces as documenting an unprecedented wave of Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment, alongside a historical revisionism that positions Europe as solely Christian. “When you look back at this work in 100 years, it will speak of all these things.”
