Moral courage needed to beat Islamaphobia in UK

London: With Islamaphobic attacks in the United Kingdom on the rise, victims may feel they have nowhere to turn when they are abused in the street, on public transport or online. But one organisation is encouraging embattled Muslims to act — by telling Mama.

Tell Mama (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) is an organisation founded — with government backing — by Ugandan-born former refugee Fiyaz Mughal in 2012. It collates and reports all kinds of Islamaphobic attacks, bringing them to the attention of the media and politicians in a bid to ensure no victims are ignored.

Mughal, whose father hails from Pakistan and mother from India, was made an OBE in 2009 for his work with communities. The 45-year-old tells Gulf News how big a problem Islamaphobia is in the United Kingdom and criticises politicians and government departments for not doing more to tackle the problem.

Excerpts of the interview:

What was your motivation for starting Tell Mama?

Members of the Muslim community had said they wanted a service that could provide support directly to victims of anti-Muslim prejudice and also to map, measure and record what’s taking place. So I guess it came from a desire within Muslim communities for this to happen. Now there are quite prevalent feelings of fear, which we didn’t expect would be so rapidly taking hold of the community, but they have because of the number of incidences.

So you’re getting a sense that the problem is getting worse.

The sense of fear and the perception of fear is growing in Muslim communities quite deeply. It was there before, but it’s much more prevalent now. The second thing is, there are far more incidences of anti-Muslim prejudice than we are picking up. And whenever there is a major international crisis there is a very large spike in anti-Muslim rhetoric and prejudice that is reported to us.

What sort of people are targeted — is there a general trend?

At street level it is visible that it’s Muslim women who wear the hijab who are clearly targeted. The profile of a person targeted is mostly female, between the ages 14 and 45. And the perpetrator is usually male, usually white, between the ages of 16 and 35.

So do you get instances of women being scared to leave their homes?

We hadn’t really seen that in the last three years, but now we are getting a lot more Muslim women saying things like ‘I let my husband do the shopping’. And in a way they’re self-isolating and that’s a problem — the confidence levels of Muslim women is dropping. It’s scary because you think of the perception that goes round to the kids, you think there could be a perception that it’s ‘them and us’. That thinking and where it could lead is not particularly healthy. Hate crime work, particularly around anti-Muslim attacks, is not just about hate crime — it can impact perception, it can impact integration, it can impact extremism.

You mention possible extremism, but do you think people in the UK can be pushed that way because of how they are treated on the street?

Certainly some of the cases of people who have gone internationally, one of the elements they cited is Islamophobia and prejudice. So we can’t rule out the fact that anti-Muslim prejudice helps to create a mindset where they don’t feel at ease and don’t feel a part of their country. It detaches them from wider society. It can’t be ignored.

So what you want to think can be done, starting with what you think the government should do?

Thankfully the government has started to take this issue seriously. What we say is, the first thing the government needs to do is to take a tougher approach towards far right extremist groups. At the moment they have an approach of ‘we can’t prosecute because legislation means we can’t get a prosecution on them’, but anti-terrorism legislation should give the government enough grounds to be able to act. We need to have more political statements coming from central government saying ‘this is not acceptable’. You have them, but they are so few and far between and are so interspersed with extremism that actually the British public just hear ‘extremism’ and they don’t hear ‘let’s tackle this kind of racism, prejudice and bigotry’.

Do you think politicians are too worried about losing votes so they don’t condemn the far right?

Politicians don’t see any value in standing up on this issue, electorally — that’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter to them. But my view is they weren’t elected to take positions just to focus on what will get them re-elected. There is a moral courage these politicians need to have and frankly they need to show it right now instead of keeping their heads below the parapet.

What about in terms of prosecutions for anti-Muslim attacks — can the authorities do more?

I think the police can do more in terms of getting proper training on understanding what is a case including anti-Muslim bigotry and what isn’t. But there’s not really much of a call for that kind of training even though we are willing to provide it. The second thing that needs to be driven home is the fact that the CPS social media guidelines, which were drawn up in 2013, are not fit for purpose. They’re now two years old and they raised the bar of prosecutions so high that you’re never going to get a prosecution unless somebody says something like ‘Mr Joe Bloggs I’m coming around your house to kill you’. The vast majority of cases will never reach prosecution, so how are you meant to change public opinion when there is so much anti-Muslim rhetoric?

What can be done in terms of education to get people to stand up to this sort of rhetoric?

The Department for Education (DfE) has been left wanting. The DfE, you would think, would be the ones falling over themselves trying to deal with some of the issues around education and tackling anti-Muslim bullying in schools. But they never bothered to respond to us, even though another of their departments is funding us. This is hilarious, I find this so bizarre, and I think it’s ideologically driven. This is not operationally driven. In other words, the DoE doesn’t give a damn. Here we are, one department is supporting our work — the Department for Communities and Local Government — and another department, the Home Office, is citing our work, but the DfE doesn’t give a damn. If something were to happen in a school, I sincerely believe the DfE have left themselves open because — and I put the charge directly to them — that they have singularly failed to even engage on this issue. I just think it’s appalling.

Bearing in mind all you have said, do you think the UK is a tolerant society?

It is a tolerant society but it is becoming less so. One problem is the country’s position on refugees. We’re not talking about economic migrants here, we’re talking about refugees and the position against refugees is not positive. Because of the actions of extremists and terrorists, there are increasingly more people in our country who are becoming intolerant of Muslim communities. I don’t think that’s the majority, but there is a growing number driven by anger because of the actions of extremists and terrorists.

So that must be a major concern.

It is a concern. Each time extremist terrorists set off a bomb, they know what they are doing. They know there will be a backlash. What they want to do is divide — they simply want to divide communities, split Europe and create internal turmoil. Those people who target members of the Muslim community are doing exactly what the extremists want them to do.

Are there any other problems your organisation faces?

You’ve got members of the right-wing press who deny the problem and who think they will do anything to undermine our work — that’s one element we have to deal with. We also have to deal with Islamists in the community, people who use Islamophobia to whip up a victim mentality. In the middle you’ve got these individuals who sadly get targeted, so it’s really tough.

Tell Mama