Muslim, Actually

How Islam is Misunderstood and Why It Matters

Tawseef Khan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781786499530
• eBook ISBN: 9781786499547
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

AS RECOMMENDED ON THE TROJAN HORSE AFFAIR PODCAST Why are Muslim men portrayed as inherently violent? Does the veil violate women's rights? Is Islam stopping Muslims from integrating? Across western societies, Muslims are perhaps more misunderstood than any other minority. How did we get here? In this landmark book, Tawseef Khan draws on history, memoir and original research to show what it is really like to live as a Muslim in the West. With unflinching honesty, he dismantles stereotypes from inside and outside the faith, and explores why many are so often wrong about even the most basic facts. Bold and provocative, Muslim, Actually is both a wake-up call for non-believers and a passionate new framework for Muslims to navigate a world that is often set against them Muslim, Actually was previously published in 2021 in hardback under the title The Muslim Problem.

1

‘Muslims Don’t Integrate’

One Christmas, my aunt invited our extended family to her house for dinner. We split the menu: one family made canapés; one roasted a leg of lamb; one prepared the trimmings. The day before, I went out with my mum to buy two turkeys, which we brined in a bath of salt and spices. The following morning, we marinated them and put them in the oven; every hour we took them out and basted them with their juices. In the aft ernoon on Christmas Day, thirty of us gathered together. We laid out the food on the dining table and, aft er several photographs, we settled down to eat.

This scene plays out in countless Muslim households, not just in the West, but across the world. I remember a visit to Pakistan many years ago. On Christmas Eve, my cousin took me to the livestock market. We purchased a live turkey and gave it to the nearby butcher. He handed us a carcass, plucked and skinned, and I carried it home in a plastic bag. The next day, we cooked it in a tandoor oven, covered in yoghurt and spices, and ate it with mashed potato and roasted vegetables. My Pakistani family, who are mostly unfamiliar with Western Christmas traditions, relished the experience.

When I was six years old, my schoolteacher knitted miniature stockings for every student in her class. We hung them on a Christmas tree that stood in the middle of our classroom and, at the end of term, we took them home. I remember it vividly – the novelty and excitement. Once I emptied the stocking of its sweets, I carried it everywhere. That year, it accompanied me to Pakistan and I recall clutching the stocking carefully when I rode on a horse-drawn carriage for the very first time. As a child, my parents took me to visit Father Christmas every year. His grotto sat in the middle of the Arndale Centre in Manchester, a line of families coiled permanently around it. Each time, my parents waited for over an hour so that I could do what other children did – meet Father Christmas and get a Christmas present from him.

Sometimes I wonder why my parents were so laidback, why they didn’t worry about these things conflicting with our faith. At high school, I was part of the choir. Every Christmas and Easter, we performed a series of concerts in the city’s churches. At home, my parents listened to me practising the hymns and carols about Jesus; sometimes they asked me to perform them in front of the family. I asked my mother about this once and she replied with typical nonchalance: ‘Well, Jesus is our prophet too, you know. We just don’t see him as the Son of God.’ Then she dismissed my question altogether. ‘There’s nothing wrong with any of this, with singing carols, with Christmas dinners. There’s no harm to it at all.’

The Christmas break marks a rare moment in the year when my family isn’t working, when we’re able to relax and spend quality time together, when we can nourish ourselves with food and television. I might be a Muslim, but it has been easy to make space in my life for Christmas. Knowing that, across the country, people are coming together like my family does, I feel connected to something bigger and more profound than the limits of my existence. I am a Muslim, but Christmas does this for me. I see no problem with that. So it hurts to witness the conflicts that are created by something as innocent as Muslims celebrating Christmas.

In recent years, The Great British Bake Off has become Britain’s most successful cultural export. The show has been sold to 196 territories and the series format licensed to at least twenty. Wholesomeness plays a large part in its success. There’s little of the melodrama that reality television is renowned for. Bake Off is a simple baking competition and, trophy aside, the victor is promised very little in the way of reward. But it has also exposed the progressively tribal (and Islamophobic) nature of Western society.

The finale to the sixth series was the most-watched show of 2015, viewed by over 15 million people in Britain. The winner was Nadiya Hussain, a thirty-year-old woman from Luton. Nadiya’s success was potent. A friend of mine, who shares Nadiya’s Bengali heritage, recalled the night of the finale. Her entire family had huddled around the television to watch it. And when Nadiya won, every single one of them – even the stoic-looking uncles – cried with happiness. I can only imagine what Nadiya’s success meant to those men, who had come to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, who had never seen a British Bengali like them achieve such public success, who never thought it was possible.

Nadiya was extremely popular with the public and this popularity appeared to break boundaries. Here was a Muslim woman who wore the hijab; she obsessed over cake and talked openly about her struggle with anxiety. It was far removed from the stereotypes that portray Muslim women as fragile and oppressed. But her presence on the show didn’t only humanize Muslim women, it seemed to help alter perceptions of Muslims as a whole. Professor Ted Cantle at the Institute of Community Cohesion claimed Nadiya had done more ‘for British-Muslim relations than 10 years of government policy’.¹

Nadiya’s popularity has allowed her to transition into a media career. She now fronts cookery shows on television and publishes novels and recipe books; Nadiya is one of the most famous Muslim figures in Britain. But the price of her success is an endless torrent of abuse.

In October 2017, Nadiya published a column for BBC Good Food magazine, sharing her Christmas recipes and tips. A summary of the article was published in the Mail Online. Soon, the comments section beneath was inundated with messages from furious readers: ‘Telling us how to celebrating Christmas? Are you ******* serious. The media is out of control with its pc agenda [sic]’; ‘Christmas advice from a Muslim! How dare a Muslim woman offer her thoughts on celebrating Christmas’; ‘Why do I want tips about how to celebrate Christmas from this woman? Would she like mine on how to celebrate Eid?’²

On Twitter, Nadiya wrote that she had read the messages before going to sleep. They had given her nightmares. Later, she said:

I get abuse for merely existing. Too brown to be English. Too Muslim to be British. Too Bengali to eat fish fingers! There is no end! I exist, we all do! Some days I hate myself for simply breathing the same air that I am so oft en told I am not en -titled to.³

This is the harm of Islamophobia – the pain of never being enough for some. It’s no coincidence that Nadiya has linked her struggle with anxiety to racism she experienced as a child.⁴ We end up directing the rejection and abuse inwards, at great personal cost. What’s unfair about this isn’t just the hate; it’s that Islamophobes can’t decide what they want from us. First they claim that Muslims won’t integrate. The Danish People’s Party, for example, demands that Muslims celebrate Christmas to prove their ‘Danishness’.⁵ But when we do, Islamophobes complain that we’re diluting and undoing the Western way of life.

Nadiya’s experience made me reflect on this contradiction. In the West, minorities are expected to shoulder the burden of integration; we keep peddling the stereotype that Muslims refuse to integrate into our societies. But here was a Muslim who had won the most popular competition on television, being the best at that quintessentially British pastime – baking. What more did the haters want from her? Which other measure of integration did they prefer? I soon realized that if Nadiya’s baking excellence, her honesty and approachability, and her participation in a key Western holiday weren’t enough to insulate her from Islamophobia, the criticisms actually had nothing to do with her conduct. And I understood that if Nadiya couldn’t be insulated from the abuse (not that I’m saying she should be, simply because she’s successful or visible, a ‘good immigrant’), the rest of us had no chance. The problem wasn’t her integration. The problem was her existence; the audacity that somebody could feel they belonged, to such an extent that they took up space in our media.

At the same time, Christmas is a flashpoint for puritanical Muslims fearful that our communities are abandoning Islam whilst living in the West. Last Christmas Day, when my turkeys were roasting in the oven, I decamped to the living room and logged on to Twitter. I scrolled down my timeline, past food photographs and Christmas anecdotes, past articles about television specials and affirmations for the lonely. It was all so heart-warming. ‘Merry Christmas’ was trending.

There’s a long-running conversation about whether Muslims can celebrate Christmas and I saw this reflected on Twitter too. The vast majority of tweets were jovial, making fun of those arguing that saying the words ‘Merry Christmas’ was sinful, or ‘haram’. But there were a few posts – backed by videos from religious preachers – that insisted Christmas was wrong.

I clicked on the videos. The preachers had two main objections: that imitating non-believers was a sin and that celebrating a non-Muslim festival was bid’ah – a betrayal of Islamic doctrine or heresy. Aft er watching a video with Assim Al-Hakeem, a conservative Saudi scholar, I searched out videos featuring Zakir Naik and Muft i Menk. Both Naik and Menk hold considerable influence in some Muslim communities. Naik is an Indian preacher and Menk the Grand Muft i of Zimbabwe; both argued that getting involved in Christmas was the same as endorsing the belief that Jesus was the Son of God and that, they claimed, was blasphemous.

I laughed at these arguments, remembering how Prophet Muhammad fasted on the day of Yom Kippur in solidarity with the Jewish tribes of Medina. The scholars of Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious religious institution in Sunni Islam, had also clarified this issue. In 2009, they said, ‘There is no harm in congratulating non-Muslims with whom you have a family relationship, or that are neighbours of yours.’⁶ I particularly enjoyed a comment written in Urdu on Twitter, addressed to the joyless Muslim preachers that interfered in our lives with their inane remarks. It went along the lines of: ‘My commitment to Islam isn’t so fragile that wishing somebody a “Merry Christmas” could weaken my faith. Develop your own faith in God so that Christmas wishing seems ordinary and doesn’t hurt your religious views.’

But there’s no doubt that as easily as I dismiss this panic amongst Muslims, there are those who are deeply conflicted by it. When I started thinking about Muslim stereotypes around integration, I returned to these videos, wondering why some Muslims, especially those of us living in the West, are so compelled by a narrative that renders any involvement in Christmas a sin. The videos reminded me of the arbitrary conflict drawn between Islam and the most important celebration in the Western calendar. That conflict, triggered here by the mere words ‘Merry Christmas’, represented a whole canvas of barriers sewn together by leaders in our communities, intent on making life more difficult for us than it needs to be.

I asked the British poet and activist Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan about how she understood the conversation about integration to operate within and outside Muslim communities. She pointed out that both of these conversations were completely separate, although they superficially appeared to be parallel:

What I mean by that is, the first conversation [the Islamophobes claiming that Muslims don’t integrate] is about race and nation. The second conversation [conservative Muslims arguing that we mustn’t integrate] stems from a very legitimate question about what it means to have faith in a secular society. What does it mean to try to live a life of submission to divine will in a society that doesn’t cater to that?

It’s worth thinking this point through. Certain Muslims do have reservations about celebrating Christmas simply because it is an expression of the Christian faith. Some go on to believe that participating in another religion’s festivals and beliefs may contradict their commitment to Islam. But Manzoor-Khan’s argument concerns Muslims for whom Christmas raises bigger questions about identity and their place in Western society. Many Muslims oppose parts of Western culture only because they are afraid of losing their own norms, so rejecting Christmas is a symptom of that. She added: ‘A lot of this [hostility] is the voice of traumatized generations of migrants who are trying to hold on to cultural norms that are threatened by living in a society where they’re completely minoritized and excluded.’ From personal experience, I know this to be true: though my parents were relaxed about Christmas when I was a child, they had certain limits (for example, we weren’t allowed to have a Christmas tree). But these boundaries disappeared in my adulthood; they went on to embrace every Christmas tradition that I brought into our home, and that is, I believe, because they felt the task of ensuring I grew up with a strong grasp of my religious and cultural identities was complete.

Although the conversations around integration that take place both within and outside of Muslim communities are only casually connected, I still believe it’s worth having them simultaneously. Very oft en, Muslims end up rejecting the West using the exact same logic and rhetoric that Islamophobes level at us – as the controversies around Christmas make clear.

What are we referring to when we talk about integration? For decades, Britain never bothered with a coherent integration policy. It still doesn’t have one. But in March 2018, the government published an ‘Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper’ which at least defined what it meant by integration. Integrated communities, it said, are ones ‘where people – whatever their background – live, work, learn and socialize together, based on shared rights, responsibilities and opportunities’.⁷ This is helpful, but only to an extent. Social cohesion is ultimately about all communities enjoying the same right to fully participate in society. Integration is actually then, I believe, the work of eliminating discrimination and generating this equality of opportunity.

Other countries have been thinking about integration far longer than Britain and have more to offer on what it involves.⁸ The Australian policy on multiculturalism ends up describing it as a kind of social contract. We all receive the same rights and responsibilities; upholding those responsibilities benefits everyone and forges a proper society. The National Integration Plan of Germany sets out what those responsibilities would look like. For newcomers to German society, it’s the responsibility to get involved, to accept its legal system and to show belonging by learning the language. For the government, it’s the responsibility to offer courses and opportunities that facilitate integration. For broader German society, it’s the responsibility to show acceptance, tolerance and a willingness to we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Muslims Don’t Integrate’
• 2. ‘Islam Is Violent’
• 3. ‘Muslim Men Are Threatening’
• 4. ‘Islam Hates Women’
• 5. ‘Islam Is Homophobic’
• Conclusion: The Muslim Problem
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index