Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has quit the Tory party because, she believes, it has become too right wing and toxic. I know and like Baroness Warsi. She’s feisty and smart and speaks her mind. But I can’t abide her deeply held, low tax, small state, pro-austerity conservative values. Nor can I comprehend how she reconciles that ideology with her passionate commitment to Muslims in Britain, many of whom suffered horribly under successive Tory governments.
Here you see two highly politicised female Muslims, whose views, at times, converge, but mostly diverge.
Twenty years ago, barely any Muslim voted for the Tories. That changed. Some, like Warsi, became prosperous business people and avid Conservatives. The rest kept faith in Labour, faith that is breaking over Keir Starmer’s response to Israel’s illegal war. Now we have Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s chair, whose Muslim parents emigrated here from Sri Lanka. Times change.
Warsi’s new book, Muslims Don’t Matter, is out today. Cover quotes include this by the multiple award-winning actor Riz Ahmed: “Burns with righteous anger. An urgent read for our times.”
While she was working on the book, riots exploded across the country. Far-right extremists tried to set fire to places housing asylum seekers; black and brown people were assaulted, mosques damaged. Warsi holds right-wing journalists, politicians and intellectuals responsible for fostering that burning hostility. I am with her on that. As is the veteran journalist Peter Oborne, who writes: “Over the past 14 years, the Tory government has established a coercive architecture of control and surveillance over British Muslims, while granting legitimacy to what would traditionally have been regarded as the far right.’”
I also salute her for taking a brave stand against Britain’s inaction over Israel’s punitive violence in Gaza. However, I cannot go along with Warsi and other prominent Muslims who believe Islamophobia defines our lives.
Anti-Muslim prejudices sting us often. On Sunday, at a wedding party, a white guy noticed I was drinking water and asked loudly if I was a Muslim. I replied: “Have you questioned others swigging water?” “No,” was the gruff response. I was the only brown guest there. The encounter made me feel like an outsider. These moments happen a lot.
Across Europe, the demonisation of Muslims has led to a frightening political project which could lead to the religious and ethnic cleansing we saw in Bosnia. Robert Jenrick wants to arrest us for saying “God is Great” in Arabic, a phrase I incant every day. But panicked Muslims should remember the dark past.
Back in 1988, when The Satanic Verses divided the nation, I felt isolated and torn as the only Muslim working in the mainstream media. I was a lover of the arts, a believer in free expression, a Salman Rushdie devotee. But I also felt an obligation to oppose the attacks on believers by the intelligentsia. Tony Blair’s obsession with Muslim enemies within led to serious human rights violations. Muslims back then had no agency, no real influence. They have both now.
Four pro-Palestinian, independent Muslims defeated sitting MPs at the last election. Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch fears they have “alien ideas which have no place here”. And Jonathan Ashworth, the toppled MP for Leicester South, moaned about the result. They now resent those who campaigned and won on an issue that matters to millions of Brits of all backgrounds.
In the last election, 25 Muslim heritage MPs got into parliament, mostly for Labour. Two are independents and two Tories. Talented Muslims are rising high in the City, in the arts and sciences and other spheres. Muslim migrants yearn to come here because they see what is possible in spite of Islamophobia. Innumerable white Brits came out to protect the riot victims and thousands march every week for Gaza. We are friends and lovers. These are big, irreversible changes.
I come to my most serious disagreement with Baroness Warsi. Her intense focus on Islamophobia distracts attention from the harm and damage we cause to ourselves or the oppression of young Muslims, particularly females and young people, who crave freedoms and choices. Progressive Muslims need to confront conservative Islam as ferociously as they do Islamophobia.
Our continuing advancement depends on honesty, cultural liberation and productive alliances with human rights activists of all races. That is harder than simply fighting Islamophobia. And as crucial, in my view.
