Bumping this, with a link to a relevant recent news story- apparently, the world's oldest surviving copy of the Quran
has been discovered in Birmingham, of all places, taking back to somewhere between 568 and 645CE- within only a few years of the actual founding of Islam...
That's actually really interesting, though I note that Birmingham's claim to fame here is basically "We had this thing but didn't look at it too closely for a century", whereas another university might have spotted it sooner [they're my
Alma mater, I'm allowed to mock]. Of course accurate dating may only be possible with the development of accurate Carbon Dating, so that limits how early it can be rediscovered. How it came to be in Birmingham is also pretty interesting:
article said:
The manuscript is part of the Mingana Collection of more than 3,000 Middle Eastern documents gathered in the 1920s by Alphonse Mingana, a Chaldean priest born near Mosul in modern-day Iraq.
He was sponsored to take collecting trips to the Middle East by Edward Cadbury, who was part of the chocolate-making dynasty.
Unfortunately contemporary Cadbury (the firm, owned by Kraft, not the dynasty, the two now being separate) seem more intent on destroying heritage than preserving it. Of course this probably raises the Elgin Marbles question - its only a matter of time before someone calls for a repatriation. Normally I'd fall down on the soft liberal side of such matters - "collecting trips to the Middle East" don't sound like the most culturally or historically sensitive of endeavors - but recent years haven't been kind to antiquities in that part of the world.
As for the OP - to bring this reply ultimately back on topic - I don't think its possible with any kind of POD post- "Anglo Saxon conversion after Tours", outside of paranoid far-right fantasies. Yes there's higher immigration rates, or "white flight up to eleven", but I think both of those overestimate how "Muslim"* this city is to begin with.
* - I use inverted commas here because this is another problem with these kind of questions - the lumping together of people from across three or more continents under a single umbrella term, and then not applying the same labels consistently for e.g. "Christian". Its muddling a homogenous ethnic group where one doesn't exist. You've got Bengalis who came over in the 1950s and 60s right through to Somalians and now Syrians, etc.
Add to this those people for whom "Muslim" is a nominal cultural label, who treat faith the way a non-religious white person might treat their being CofE, and who have no interest in the kind of self-segregation as stoked up in Fox News fears. Yeah you could, at a push, get a majority "Muslim" Birmingham, but it wouldn't be homogenous, it wouldn't be a monolithic neo-caliphate, and there'd almost by definition be a lot of intermarriage.
Certain parts of the city
do meet the plurality/majority criteria, but I'd argue that that's as much an artifact of urban planning and immigration patterns. This city isn't majority Irish today because parts of it were in the early 1900s - that population has moved on and up and generally assimilated. The same is already happening for 2nd/3rd generation British Asians, as a walk down the poshest streets in Harborne will tell you. As for the "no go zone" criteria - in my experience that's far more likely to happen the other way around.
Apologies for the long-winded reply, it kind of snowballed
[Sources: Live here, elections stuff].
