Prejudices can always be rationalised: racial segregation is upheld as natural. Complaints about sexism get dismissed as emotional outbursts. Muslims encounter a particular version of this: according to hostile politicians and journalists, anger against them is their own fault. Being frightened of their faith is normal – and “Islamophobia” is just a fancy word, invented to shield extremists from criticism.
Gaslighting is always hard to counter. To state what should be obvious, however, no belief system has a monopoly on either wisdom or ignorance and violence. Outliers exist in every group. The existence of flawed individuals doesn’t justify gross generalisations, though – let alone the claim that slurs are harmless.
Only the most twitchy Muslim-baiter would call Sayeeda Warsi, former Conservative party chair, an extremist. Since resigning from David Cameron’s cabinet in 2014 over its “morally indefensible” policies towards Palestine, she has also campaigned against antisemitism and the persecution of Christians, earning death threats from Islamic State in the process. “It’s time to stop comparing the worst of one community to the best of another,” she writes. She’s actually been arguing that point since her Sternberg lecture in 2011, when she said that disdain for Islam was becoming so routine it passed “the dinner-table test”.
Warsi doesn’t spare her former colleagues. Her account, measured but forceful, claims that Tory ministers systematically marginalised Muslim concerns, undermining human rights that should be universal. Slights and smears were commonplace, she writes, and successive administrations often preferred to engage with pliant puppets, rather than credible community leaders. Zealots like Michael Gove barely acknowledged complaints of bias, treating them as distractions or delusions. Misogyny among Muslims was deplored, but women weren’t offered assistance. Though Suella Braverman and colleagues talked up the involvement of British Pakistanis in paedophile grooming gangs, when it came to Shamima Begum, a British teenager groomed by IS, Sajid Javid removed the most basic legal protection of all: her citizenship.
Those inadequacies count for less now that they’re out of office – and Warsi is “relieved and grateful” that they lost power. She hopes Labour will do better, by respecting a cross-party report about anti-Muslim hatred that Rishi Sunak ignored. It defines Islamophobia as a prejudice “rooted in racism”, which “targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. That’s contentious – if only because so much hostility has come from senior politicians who aren’t white – but Warsi argues powerfully in its support.
She is right to do so. Efforts to differentiate Islamophobia from racism are a quibble rather than a critique. Religion may not be the same as race, but that didn’t stop respondents to a 2022 poll disliking Muslims more than any other social group except Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Negative stereotypes have existed since the crusades and although it’s Jews who were typically reviled as an enemy within, fears of Muslim invaders at the gates can still billow into hate, even pogroms. The killing in July of three children in Southport, falsely attributed to a nonexistent Muslim refugee, led to frenzied attacks on non-white people. Mosques and hostels were targeted with the specific aim of burning Muslims alive.Mosques and hostels were targeted with the specific aim of burning Muslims alive.
That’s why Warsi’s favoured definition of Islamophobia refers to “perceptions of Muslimness”. Racists don’t care what their targets actually think. More than a quarter of the Islamophobic hate crimes recorded by the Metropolitan police in 2015 targeted non-Muslims, including many Sikhs and Hindus. No one is safe – as is memorably illustrated by an incident that Warsi recounts involving Sajid Javid.
The man Theresa May appointed to lead the Home Office in 2018 has always stressed he’s Muslim by birth only. That was irrelevant a year later, however, when her government organised a state banquet in honour of Donald Trump. Capitulating to the US president’s bigotry, Downing Street declined to invite its own home secretary. Stung by the snub, Javid promptly bounced rivals in the contest to succeed May into saying they would support an inquiry into Tory Islamophobia. Warsi generously calls that “a glimpse of the kind of politician he could have been”. Perhaps. But it’s also evidence that you don’t have to be a pious Muslim – or a principled one, for that matter – to be victimised for your presumed beliefs.
• Muslims Don’t Matter by Sayeeda Warsi is published by Bridge Street (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
