The line appeared on a slide in a Project Unity session. “Mother Mary wore a hijab”, it read. The example was used to support the argument that Islam’s attitude towards women does not conflict with Western values. The same talk told staff that “Jesus grew a beard”, as Muslim men are instructed to, and claimed that “the hijab was prevalent in the UK only 100 years ago”, illustrating the point with images of shawls worn in early 20th century Britain. Those images show forms of head covering worn by British women, but they do not by themselves establish that the Islamic hijab was prevalent in Britain a century ago. The Telegraph reported the session this week.
There is a problem with the central claim. Mary was a Jewish woman in first-century Judea. Women in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East used various forms of head covering, and Christian art frequently depicts Mary with her head covered. But she lived roughly six centuries before the emergence of Islam, and centuries before the hijab as it is understood today, a scarf worn to cover the hair. No images of Mary or Jesus were made for centuries after their lifetimes, and Jesus was first shown as a beardless young man.
The distinction is one of chronology and terminology. A veil or head covering worn in first-century Judea is not evidence that a woman wore the Islamic hijab.
Project Unity is not a fringe operation. The Telegraph understands its material has also been presented to students, police officers and civil servants responsible for Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme. That is a wider audience than the North Yorkshire Council staff who received the workshop containing the Mary slide, and it should not be confused with it.
The charity behind the programme, Better Communities Bradford, has received £490,000 in public funding from the National Lottery Community Fund since 2019. That figure covers the charity’s wider work. A separate £35,000 grant was awarded specifically to roll out Project Unity. Its chief executive, Abbas Najib, a former police officer, told LBC the programme has been delivered to more than 2,500 people across West and North Yorkshire.
The material goes well beyond the slide on Mary. Sessions include defences of Sharia, described on one slide as “not a foreign threat”. Another states that one element of Islamic jurisprudence requires that “children cannot be struck on the face, cannot be marked, and must freely consent to marriage”. Pro-Palestinian marches are described in the talks as “protesting genocide”. Written material accompanying the training claims that women are not oppressed by the stipulations of Islam, and that “Muslims, the immigrant, the brown person” were scapegoated for a flatlining economy when the blame lay with “the rich”.
The council training surfaced after The Telegraph obtained footage of a talk built on Project Unity material, given at the York and North Yorkshire Hate Crime Conference in 2025 and attended by North Yorkshire Police officers. In it, Mr Najib used Nigel Farage as a case study. Officers were shown a 2024 interview in which the Reform UK leader warned that “growing numbers of people do not subscribe to British values”, naming Muslims and attendees of pro-Palestine marches in London. He cited a survey published by the Henry Jackson Society that found 46 per cent of British Muslims supported Hamas. Delegates were then shown footage of a man racially abusing a Muslim bus driver and asked to “think about the relationship” between the two pieces of material. The comparison was Mr Najib’s.
“Ask yourself, who is going to get into trouble between those two gentlemen? And who did the most harm?” Mr Najib said. He added: “Sitting in a national news studio and saying ‘Jews hate Britain’, he’d be locked up before he left the studio, and too right, too.”
The talk also criticised politicians who described pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “hate marches”, naming Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, both now Reform MPs, and Michael Gove. It used footage of Matthew Goodwin, the GB News presenter and a former Reform parliamentary candidate, discussing British values.
Mr Najib stands by the material. He confirmed to LBC that the Mary slide was part of a Project Unity workshop delivered to North Yorkshire Council staff, and said the programme stands by it. “Hijab is an Arabic word meaning a covering, and in everyday use it simply means a woman’s head covering,” he said. “Mary is depicted wearing one in Christian art across the centuries, and headscarves were common among women in Britain within living memory.” His point, he said, was that covering the head is a shared tradition “not something foreign or unique to Islam”. On the Farage comparison, he told GB News that, in his view, generalisations about an entire faith community are Islamophobic, and that he asked delegates how the same claim would be treated if it were made about Jewish people. “Asking delegates to reflect on that inconsistency is exactly what hate crime training should do, and I stand by it,” he said.
Both institutions have distanced themselves from the material. North Yorkshire Councilstressed the talks were not part of its own training material. North Yorkshire Police said the session was not part of its training programme and was not delivered by a police employee. Police sources said it formed part of the conference schedule.
The disclosure lands in the middle of a wider argument about how the British state defines and polices hostility to religion. In March, the government published its non-statutory definition of anti-Muslim hostility. The government says the definition protects Muslims as individuals rather than Islam as a religion, does not change criminal law, and is intended to preserve criticism, debate, analysis and other protected expression about faith.
The Free Speech Union argues the definition risks chilling legitimate debate, and has described the wider trend as a creeping blasphemy restriction applied to Islam alone. Separately, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned the Working Group that an official non-statutory definition could lead to inconsistency and conflict with existing law, and advised that any adoption should follow a full public consultation. The commission has said it will not adopt the definition. Its reasoning is its own. In August it was reported that the government department responsible had deleted responses to its consultation on the definition, a claim that has prompted Freedom of Information questions from the shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy.
Against that backdrop, the cases keep arriving. Stephen Gray, 65, a former Cleveland Policeofficer who gave thirty years to the force, was convicted at Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court in April 2026 of sending a grossly offensive message under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, after resharing a Facebook post about Islam. He was fined more than £1,000 in fines and costs. He is appealing, with the Free Speech Union instructing counsel, and a hearing is expected in November. Earlier this year, South Wales Police adopted the government’s definition and added its own instruction that officers record anti-Muslim hostility as an anti-social behaviour incident. After the Free Speech Union threatened a judicial review, the force said it would pause aligning with the definition pending guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
Public money, a council slide, and a claim about the mother of Christ that the historical record does not support.
Claire Bullivant, chief executive of the Great British PAC, said:
“This is precisely the sort of nonsense taxpayers are sick of funding.
The Virgin Mary was a Jewish woman who lived around six centuries before Islam emerged. Calling the head covering she may have worn a ‘hijab’ is not serious history, it is imposing a modern religious term retrospectively on a woman who lived hundreds of years before that religion existed.
More troubling still is that material from this programme has been presented to people working in our councils, police and public services. Those entrusted with enforcing our laws and protecting the public need rigorous, politically neutral training grounded in facts, not ideology dressed up as education.
Britain should be a country where every citizen is treated equally before the law, every faith is respected, and every religion and political idea remains open to peaceful criticism and debate. We do not achieve tolerance by rewriting history or making people frightened to speak honestly.
And taxpayers certainly should not be expected to pick up the bill for it.
Public money should be spent on public services, not lectures telling British people that the Virgin Mary wore a hijab.”
If public money is going to support religious-history training, the history should at least get the centuries in the right order.
