How did British Muslims become ‘the problem’?

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0:07Nosheen Iqbal:Today, how did British Muslims become the problem?

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0:53Nosheen Iqbal:Last year in a small city about an hour north of London, I was out for a walk with my nieces when we came across a man walking his dog. One niece wanted to pet it, so we stopped for a chat. The dog owner couldn't get his head round it. Because as far as he knew, all Muslims hate dogs. And that's why the government was trying to take our dogs away. This man, I'd say he was probably in his 60s, was genuinely serious. he thought that Keir Starmer was trying to ban all dogs and that he was doing it for Muslims. I wasn't shocked. I probably should have been more affronted than amused. But this is where toxic political rhetoric and the internet has gotten us.

1:40Nosheen Iqbal:There's a lot of conversation had about Muslims in Britain. Not a lot of listening, but a lot of myths and outright lies peddled to make the public think that Muslims aren't just a problem, but a threat. and the impact is violent and it's scary. The pictures may be grainy, but the sound of a laugh is clear. The object was a pig's head. Randomly, this man came to me, punched me right in my face and told me to go back to my country. Hello, you do take away? Yes. OK, so I'll come over and take away your life. I'll come over and take away your life, says the voice left on his answer phone. Anti-Muslim hate crimes in England and Wales doubled in 2024.

2:27Nosheen Iqbal:Attacks on mosques, on women, on doctors and taxi drivers, on children. And that's just the reported ones. Meanwhile, the government has stated that it can't even agree on a definition of what Islamophobia is. Without being able to name it, how will they expect to tackle it? Does anyone even care? From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, Muslims on Processing Anti-Muslim Hatred.

3:04Nosheen Iqbal:Welcome to Today in Focus. We're here today with Mkhdard Versi, founder of Centre for Media Monitoring, Amna Modin, The Guardian's community affairs correspondent, and Shaist Aziz, anti-racism campaigner, formerly one of the first Labour councillors to resign in protest over Keir Starmer's comments on Gaza in October 2023 when he said Israel had the right to cut off water and electricity from Gazans and you work on campaigns at Oxfam. So thank you all for being here. Let's start with something easy. How would you describe the role that faith plays in your life and your relationship with it? So my parents came to this country as immigrants from Pakistan.

3:44They had a version of Islam that they grew up with. And in many ways, their version of Islam has anchored me and it's different to the version that I practice as well. And I think one of the challenges around being part of a faith community is to navigate that path in more and more troubling times.

4:01Nosheen Iqbal:And Mikdad, how about you? What part does faith play in your life? When I was younger, I always thought I'm a Muslim, I'm very proud to be a Muslim, but I'm a mathematician or I play cricket, not necessarily very well. But you know, It would be incidental, important part of my character, but incidental. More and more in certain circumstances and certain fields, it has to be front and center as to who I am. There are so many people who are in so many difficult circumstances because of their Muslim identity. And it feels like if you don't try and stand up for all, you're diminishing what it means to be Muslim here in this country.

4:35So it's become more and more important for me not to be so incidental about my Islam, about my Muslimness, and actually be more, I'm Muslim, yeah, that's it. And even now at work, I've started to not, when I was younger, maybe I hid it a little bit. Maybe I was not hid it in a negative way, but it wasn't relevant. But now I'm like, I'm Muslim, can we please try and find a restaurant with halal? I'm not going to be apologetic. But at the same time, I'm wary that for some people, I don't want to go too far.

5:05Nosheen Iqbal:Yeah, it's code switching, but there's a balance, as you say. There's a balance. Amna, what part does faith play in your life? What's your relationship like with it? If you're my mum watching this, everything. It's a very private thing for me, my relationship to God. And there are many people like me who want to practice their faith in private. Of course, there's much bigger communal festivals. Like, you know, Ramadan, I do get involved with communal celebrations. But what's kind of happened in the past 20 years is that being Muslim has become a very politicised identity. So even just the question of, is the restaurant halal?

5:41It feels like quite a political decision to bring that up in a space of work, in your friendship group. Particularly now, it feels like an act of resistance, like an act of inserting yourself to say, I'm going to be fasting this month, so I can't be doing these work hours or I'm going to be going home at this time. Just even saying that there is a bit like I'm putting my head above the paraphernalia.

6:03Nosheen Iqbal:Have you put the flexible working request in? I have. So I think, yeah, it feels like there's really deeply political identity when it's just not. It's just like, I don't know, as natural as being black, being a woman, like it just feels something as easy as breathing for me. But the people around me, I feel like the political situation means that's not the case. Like questions of do you give a more passing name to your Muslim child or not? And I really did agonize about it. I mean, I won't say his name now, but I didn't choose a passing name. And I think that felt really strong to me to be able to say this is part of my identity.

6:37I was born part of this community. I'm very proud of it, very proud of my family particularly. The role that faith has played in anchoring us after we survived the civil war, so it was Somali refugees and came to the UK in the late 90s. I've just seen it being this hugely expansive and strengthening thing. So it's been interesting to kind of often felt like I've been on the defensive in the past 10 years.

7:09Nosheen Iqbal:Well, I don't think it's a secret that there has been this marked increase in hostility towards Muslims in recent years. And you just think about the fact that Tommy Robinson, once a fringe racist, is now more popular and famous than ever. His ideas seem to be poisoning our political rhetoric. As the most visibly Muslim person on this panel, walking down the streets in Britain in 2026, How does it feel to be you at the moment? So it's very exhausting. Increasingly, it's becoming more frightening. I have to be honest with you and say I'm not scared for myself. I am a woman of the world. I know how to take care of myself.

7:50And I also know that I can't take care of myself against increasing levels of violence and racialized misogyny and Islamophobia. I feel really scared for the elders in my community. Over the last 10 years in particular, I have been subjected to increasing levels of physical violence on the streets of the country I was born and raised in. Examples include a random man while I was standing at the bus stop using a racial slur against me and then lurching forward to punch me. And I was absolutely stunned and I obviously moved myself away from him. And, you know, the impact of all of that is devastating.

8:27It makes you feel very unsafe. But for me, it made me feel like I didn't want to engage with the wider world and I needed to go inward to protect myself. And that is what happens when you are being targeted and victimized. So I would like people who are listening to this who maybe don't live the lives that British Muslims live to understand that this is real. And just because you don't experience it doesn't mean that you don't need to engage with it and you don't need to deal with it. Because at the end of the day, if the most vulnerable and targeted people in our society are being dehumanized and demonized on a daily basis, then that means nobody's safe.

9:04So if my Jewish brothers and sisters aren't safe, then I'm not safe. If my family who are disabled aren't safe or trans or whatever they are, if they're not safe, then none of us are safe. So I think it's about time that we all understand that it's not our responsibility to deal with this if it only, inverted commas, impacts us. It should impact all of us. make that? I guess on social media, it gets amplified a lot. I don't know how far it is a full reflection of reality. But we did have summer riots in the UK only a year and a half ago. My local mosque was one of those in the area in which there was going to be a riot.

9:41I had to go home early to make sure my kids were staying at home. And, you know, it did change my life in that circumstance. And on social media, on a daily basis, random things that I post, the amount of hate and vitriol, it's astonishing. And it seems to spread in a very dangerous direction. Once it was on the fringe, very much on the fringe. And yes, there were a lot of others who might have had sympathy for it, but they wouldn't necessarily vocalize that sympathy because they realized it was wrong. Now, there is this real opening up of the hatred in a very dangerous way. I mean, you have the current shadow secretary, Nick Timothy, he wrote in the Telegraph about how there should be a register of imams and mosques.

10:20And you're like, okay, you want to do that about churches, about synagogues, about temples? No. Or is it just about mosques and imams? And the answer is yes.

10:27Nosheen Iqbal:Yes, yeah. And you have people like Robert Jenrick. He wanted to arrest people for saying Allahu Akbar on the street. Which means God is great. God is great. I mean, if you are religiously Muslim, if you're politically Muslim, that means you're an Islamist and therefore a threat to our society. These are major figures in our country who are demonizing ordinary Muslims going about their daily life. And that's my children. That's my community. That's my friends. When you think about all of that, when in reality, Muslims are contributing to this country, I think 15 % of doctors are Muslim, you know, compared to about 6 % of the population.

11:02Muslims are generally the youngest part of this country. I think half of Muslims are under the age of 25 or 30 or something like that. They're the next generation coming up, helping to pay for the pensions of this country, right? Muslims are giving charity four times more than those of other faiths. Muslims are contributing as part of the society.

11:17Nosheen Iqbal:It's interesting. So we still have to weigh up in terms of the good contributions. You shouldn't have to. You shouldn't have to, of course. But I mean, Amna, I wonder if you have a similar thing about your experiences. Guardian journalists like me who lives in London and in some ways may think that you're insulated or may feel like you're insulated from the day to day experience of, you know, a Muslim person in a smaller area. And I've certainly had experiences in the last couple of years which have really thrown me. people publicly saying to my face that they're proud to be racist after being racist.

11:48Nosheen Iqbal:How have you experienced this rise, this temperature rise, this hostility? It's been deeply painful to watch and to hear. But I do feel really insulated in East London, I have to be honest. You know, I live in Newham. There's a really big Muslim population. There's a really big British Asian and Black British population there. So I haven't seen as much firsthand accounts that you've described, which is horrifying. but there have been racist graffitis in our local mosques and we have had to call for more support from the government. There was a really interesting briefing from the Muslim Council of Britain who said you have had to experience a hate crime before you can apply for this funding to get extra security.

12:26I don't believe that happens for other faith groups so it should be the baseline. So there is just so much of the fundamentals are just not there but like you said you're having people calling for registry lists instead so things are very tipsy-turvy.

12:38Nosheen Iqbal:This taps into one of your hobbies I think which is I think I've heard from you every now and again. You do sometimes do a little Google search on attacks on mosques in the UK. I was going to say, I hope you're not suggesting hate crimes my hobby then. Yeah, so I was saying to you that every now and then, I haven't done this for a while, I Google mosques attacked in the UK and page after page after page, and you're nodding along here, that appears and you're like, wow, okay, all of this is taking place in this country at whatever given week or month I've done this random Google search. And it does tell a really horrifying picture of the magnitude of Islamophobic violence that British communities are facing across this country.

13:21And it's not talked about. You know, it's not a mainstream news story. And for anybody out there listening to this, Google it and you'll see it for yourself. It's extraordinary. I don't know where people are getting all these pig heads from that they're putting outside masks. I know, but also why do they think pig heads are like kryptonite to Muslims? It's like, oh, can you just please move on from this now, right? But on a serious note, it's things from like windows in a mosque being broken to paint being thrown. It's a wide range of violence that is being deliberately put onto a religious building that then obviously impacts a wide constituency of people.

13:57It's disgusting.

13:58Nosheen Iqbal:Yeah, I joke about it, but it absolutely doesn't still fear. If that happens at your local mosque, you are terrorised. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Because I think when most people think about Islamophobia or prejudice that Muslims face, they think about the extreme abusive end of things. And of course, as we all know, there's sometimes more pernicious, subtle forms of anti-Muslim bigotry. Mith Nath, you're no stranger to the idea that there are these huge misconceptions, you know, as Muslims, we're automatically anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist, all that. I mean, how do you encounter that and how do you deal with it?

14:35It gets to the very nature of who people are, right? So just this week, John Cleese, the Fawlty Towers guy.

14:43Nosheen Iqbal:Every time he opens his mouth, I'm just increasingly like, well, please, stop. I mean, sharing Tommy Robinson one thing, saying that Muslims hate dogs, so should leave the country. I mean, it's just astonishing, right? There's one thing when they are trying to engage with a difficult topic in a thoughtful way. And there are topics that need to be talked about. But this stuff, they're just making stuff up. They're misrepresenting. They're cherry picking. They're trying to create a narrative about who Muslims are that is so divorced from reality and fact, that means that if you're an ordinary person and this is all you see, this is all you hear, and you have an algorithm on the social media which encourages this kind of vitriolic hate about immigrants and Muslims, it means that that's all you see.

15:27And the polling seems to suggest that Muslims are genuinely a group that are considered to be supportive of terrorism within a growing minority of our country. And as has been talked about before, it's not just being done by the fringe. It is being done by mainstream politicians, by people who really should know better. And I think they do know better. And they are choosing to do this because they think that it will get them extra votes.

16:05Nosheen Iqbal:In terms of how we got here to this particular moment in Britain, What would you say is driving this persistent rhetoric that Muslims are here to try and take over Britain? And how is that filtering to how you're experiencing the world? Well, we haven't got here overnight. It's taken many decades to get here. And right now it's been turbo charged further during the 10 years, I think now, of Brexit. A lot of liberals, particularly white liberals, like to keep going on about how shocked they are. And my take on that is, well, if you're shocked, you're not paying attention. You have not been paying attention to what has been going on for decades in this country.

16:41And I think there's this perception that we as people want to be separate from everyone else. Well, I think actually it's the exact opposite. That's true. I think Britain's not segregated because the Muslims all want to go and live in their so-called enclaves. Most white people I know, and I know quite a few, surprise, surprise, they all say to me, I've never met a Muslim before. And I'm thinking most of the people who say this to me are professional people. Many of them are middle class people. They're not working class people. Most working class people, we rub against each other every day with consent, I'd like to add, on the bus, on the factory floor, working, sharing our lunches, all of that.

17:18Right. So I think there needs to be a bit of a different framing of this. And I think people need to ask themselves, well, how can you live in such a racially diverse country and not meet people?

17:30Nosheen Iqbal:Mikdard, what would you say about why it is and how it is that we've got here? There's this underlying worry that Muslims are so different and just cannot accept, cannot integrate, cannot be the same. And in fact, at the same time, there are others who are trying to make this idea that Islam is trying to take over. You know, the idea that you can get 50 Muslims in a room to agree how to take over, it's quite challenging. One of the stats is a while ago, 20 % of the population think the Muslims have a secret plot to take over the country. I mean, just it's just such ridiculousness. and there are these liberals who have this view that Muslims just aren't very liberal and therefore aren't the same and you've got the right wing who are starting to think that actually Muslims are taking over this country bit by bit I mean with six percent of the population six percent okay fine there's the mayor of London who's in the UK well hey but come on that's it's just not true that every proportionate discussion that you have and take over to do what I mean yeah like Amna as the journalist I mean give us some stats and facts on this the stats are quite harrowing and really staggering latest you go of polling data shows that most British people don't think Islam is compatible with British values which is really bizarre to me I think most of our kids will be going into school learning what British values are they reflect it in their daily lives I don't want to get into that habit of but we're your doctors and we're really good at baking but it It feels like that has completely failed, if that's how bad that is.

19:02And that stat cannot be understood without also understanding that the number of Islamophobic assaults have increased by 73 % between 2023 to 2024. Genuinely, every leader that I talk to within the Muslim community in this country is saying, this is an unparalleled time to be Muslim. The danger is here, we desperately need help, and they are being ignored.

19:25Nosheen Iqbal:Miktad, you have diligently been combing British media coverage since I think 2018, writing very polite letters to Ipso and Ofcom, our press regulators, on biased or Islamophobic coverage. What have you noticed in that time about how Muslims are covered and represented? I think that what we see is that over the last year or two, the vitriol seems to have gone up, in particular with the launch of GB News. On GB News, you're seeing more and more hateful language towards Muslims, sometimes coded as Islamist, but always referring to underlying Muslims and often lies. Someone was on GB News and lied about the biggest Muslim charity, Islamic Relief, and GB News had to retract it.

20:13That happened with The Telegraph this year. They called someone an Islamist and then later on realized, oh, sorry, there's nothing to do with Islam as a motive for an attack. Before it seemed like it was laziness. It was awful, can't be bothered. No one in the newsroom. Yeah, but no one in the newsroom was Muslim. So, you know, it just happens. Now it seems that it's less inaccuracy and more intentional bias, intentional cherry picking, intentional. I'm going to have a specific attack on you. and it's political. Let me give an example. The definition of Islamophobia. The Telegraph had like probably a dozen, two dozen articles attacking that.

20:52Nosheen Iqbal:Can you explain why? Yeah, on the grounds of what would the Telegraph be saying? The Telegraph would say that defining Islamophobia will mean that protests will not be possible. Defining Islamophobia will make it illegal to say certain things. All of this stuff is just not true. They're just making things up so that even the acknowledgement of a hate crime against Muslims and the hate that happens in multiple levels, the structural hate, the discrimination that takes place, that can't even be defined. Forget about tackled. There are definitions of other hate crimes out there. There's no problem for the Telegraph when there's a definition of anti-Semitism, but there is a problem when there's trying to be a definition of Islamophobia.