Years of building bridges turns NIMBY into ‘yes’ for mosque in England

The first time that Tanweer Ahmed, a soft-spoken hospital research director, met Ian Durrant, a bluff ex-British Army sergeant, they were on opposite sides of a fight that was going to get increasingly ugly: Professor Ahmed wanted to build a mosque in this provincial cathedral city; Mr. Durrant was trying to stop him.

That was twelve years ago; earlier this month Ahmed welcomed Durrant to the mosque’s opening as an honored guest. “I think now we are friends,” he says.

That reconciliation signals a new mood in the neighborhood. In a country where immigrant newcomers often complain they do not feel welcome, and where many indigenous Britons say they no longer feel at home, Lincoln’s example suggests that home-making does not have to be a zero-sum game.

Local people who had feared the Islamic place of worship as “a foreign object in a Christian area,” as Durrant puts it,