UK mosques open up to visitors for food, tea, and a chance to talk

Imams in the United Kingdom want to talk.

Around 150 mosques across the country welcomed guests on Sunday as anti-Islamic rhetoric and crime continues to flow into everyday life in much of western Europe and the United States.

The goal of the event -- organized by the Muslim Council of Great Britain and galvanized with the hashtag #VisitMyMosque -- was conversation, along with some food and tea. Muslims opened up their mosques so anyone with questions could ask them, no matter the topic.

Folks that were gathered at a mosque in Birmingham asked what Muslims think of Jesus and how people there were combatting Islamic State (ISIS), according to Al Jazeera. At Finsbury Park mosque in London, Muslims answered questions about the way they pray and the difficulty of fasting from sun-up until sundown during the month of Ramadan, The Guardian reports.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was in attendance at Finsbury Park, where he spoke about the dangers of divisive language. “Over the past few weeks, there’s been some awful language used in many parts of the world," he said. "Awful language degenerates into awful actions. Those awful actions end up in the deaths of wholly innocent people."

He also took a shot at U.S. President Donald Trump, whom Corbyn no doubt believes is among those peddling what he described as "awful language."

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Trump campaigned for the presidency partly on the promise of keeping Muslims out of the U.S., and at one point said he would "certainly implement" a system to track Muslims in the country.

His presidency was barely a week old when he signed an executive order aimed at restricting immigration to the U.S. for those with passports from Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia and Syria. Detractors called the act a "Muslim ban," and former New York City Mayor and Trump superfan Rudy Giuliani said Trump initially asked him how he might "legally" construct a way to bar Muslims from the country.

Pew Research Center analysis of FBI statistics show anti-Muslim crime in the U.S. in 2015 -- the latest year for which data is available -- it was at levels not seen since 2001, the year of 9/11 attacks. Attacks have also spiked against people the perpetrators believe to be Arab, according to data compiled by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Anti-Muslim attacks shot up across the Atlantic in 2015, too. In the U.K., such attacks saw a 326 percent increase.