Updated: 5d ago

By Jacob Paul

Council staff have been told that the Virgin Mary “wore a hijab” and that “Jesus grew a beard” during a lecture about Islamophobia.

Staff at a North Yorkshire council, who handle work on anti-terror, were also told that “the hijab was prevalent in the UK only 100 years ago”.

The talk, which was part of a publicly-funded training programme named Project Unity. 

It was aimed at teaching staff that Islam’s attitude to women does not conflict with Western values. 

“Mother Mary wore a hijab”, staff were told in the presentation.

Historians say Mary, as a Jewish woman in the 1st Century, most likely wore some kind of head covering, with later works often showing her wearing a shawl or veil.

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This is not the same as a hijab, a headscarf worn by women practicing Islam, a religion which only came into fruition around 600 years after Mary’s death.

The lecture to North Yorkshire council staff was delivered by Abbas Najib, a former police officer who is now the chief executive of grassroots charity Better Communities Bradford.

It was part of a series of lectures aimed at tackling Islamophobia and addressing concerns that Muslim ideology is in conflict with British values.

Other presentations delivered as part of the series have also included defences of Sharia, insisting the Muslim doctrine is “not a foreign threat.

On one slide, seen by The Telegraph, it read that it “is a moral tradition – like any other – shaped by faith, reason and a commitment to human dignity.”

Project Unity has also reportedly been delivered  to students, police officers and civil servants handling the Government’s counter-extremism Prevent programme.

Speaking at the North Yorkshire Hate Crime Conference in 2025, Mr Najib used Nigel Farage to demonstrate hate speech during the talk to police officers.

Officers from the force were asked to consider the “harm” done by Nigel Farage.

They were shown a video of the Reform UK leader warning that “growing numbers of people do not subscribe to British values”.

In the clip, Mr Farage said this group included Muslims and pro-Palestine activists who have attended London protests.

Mr Nijab told the audience: “Ask yourself, who is going to get into trouble between those two gentlemen? And who did the most harm?”

“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,” he added.

Mr Nijab has stressed that it is critically important to teach people about the issue of Islamophobia, arguing his programme exists to “reduce anti-Muslim hostility and strengthen trust between communities”.

He said the workshops look at how public language can fuel prejudice and ask participants to think about how the same words would be received if directed at Jewish, black or other minority communities.

Mr Nijab told LBC: “I can confirm the slide was part of a Project UNITY workshop delivered to North Yorkshire Council staff, and we stand by it.

“Hijab is an Arabic word meaning a covering, and in everyday use it simply means a woman’s head covering. Mary is depicted wearing one in Christian art across the centuries, and headscarves were common among women in Britain within living memory.

“The point of the slide is that covering the head is a shared tradition across faiths and cultures, not something foreign or unique to Islam.

“Project UNITY has been delivered to more than 2,500 people across West and North Yorkshire. Its purpose is to help people understand the communities they serve, and finding common ground is at the heart of that.”

source https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/virgin-mary-wore-hijab-islamophobia-5HjdjFR_2/