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The “Muslim community” emerged in the late 1980s in the wake of the unprecedented crisis triggered off by the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Initially lacking political expertise, the Muslim community gradually federated on a conservative, or indeed, radical basis within the Muslim Council of Britain, whose professionalism allowed it on many occasions to exert pressure on the New Labour government and to impose itself durably as its main contact. This occurred against a difficult background of intense questioning of multiculturalism and at a time when new foreign policy orientations were being defined. Deemed insufficiently representative, the MCB fell into disgrace at the end of the Blair era and was replaced by hardly more legitimate organisations, despite the blatant failure of the government’s mediation strategy with radical Muslims through religiously and socially conservative “representative” organisations, which imprison people within their religious identity, real or supposed.