Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet and educator disrupting understandings of history, race, knowledge and violence. She works to equip herself and others with the tools and faith to resist the unliveable conditions we find ourselves in, and work towards another reality.
Suhaiymah’s latest book, Seeing for Ourselves: And even stranger possibilities came out with Hajar Press in September 2023. Prior to this she authored Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (Pluto Press, 2022) which was widely endorsed by the likes of Lowkey, Moazzam Begg, Fatima Manji, Lola Olufemi and more.
In 2019 Suhaiymah’s debut poetry collection Postcolonial Banter was published, featuring eight years worth of poetry including her viral poem This is Not a Humanising Poem which placed her as runner-up of the National Roundhouse Poetry Slam in 2017 and has over two million views online. Postcolonial Banter critiques and troubles narratives about racism, systemic Islamophobia, the function of the nation-state and secularist visions of identity.
Suhaiymah’s poetry and prose has appeared across radio and TV stations. She has written for The Guardian, Independent, Al-Jazeera, and gal-dem, hosts the Breaking Binaries podcast (on hiatus), and has essays in multiple anti-racist anthologies including I Refuse To Condemn (2020) and Cut From The Same Cloth? (2021) as well as her co-authored debut work, A Fly Girl’s Guide to University: Being women of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism (2019) which was written with Odelia Younge, Lola Olufemi and Audrey Sebatindira when the four were students at Cambridge.
Suhaiymah was resident writer at the Leeds Playhouse (2021-22), and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London (2020-22). She was selected for the Royal Court 2021 Writers Group and is currently under commission to Kiln theatre. Suhaiymah is also an active member of the Geographies of Embodiment (GEM) research collective and very active co-founder of abolitionist group and volunteer collective working in solidarity with Muslims in prison, The Nejma Collective.
By the blessings of Allah, Suhaiymah has lectured and performed from New York to Las Vegas, Berlin to Edinburgh and Luton to Sheffield. For over seven years she has facilitated creative writing and political education workshops and been invited to speak at symposiums, Universities, conferences, social advocacy events and protests, and to write on a range of topics. Through these means and more Suhaiymah campaigns against and resists Islamophobia and other state-sanctioned forms of racism - particularly policing and surveillance apparatuses in all their guises.
Suhaiymah has a Double First Class BA in History from Cambridge University and her dissertation researching the experiences of Pakistani migrant women between 1960-1980 was awarded the best dissertation across three faculties and nominated to the Royal Historical Society dissertation competition as the best dissertation in the Cambridge History Department in 2016. She also has an MA from SOAS in Postcolonial Studies. Her experiences studying showed Suhaiymah the confines and violent biases of the current ideological order, as well as the limits of calls for “equality, diversity and inclusion” or “representation” in fundamentally flawed institutions. She left University clear that under conditions of capitalism, such calls are simply tools to rebrand historically violent systems and gate-kept institutions invested in colonial relationships. Instead of “diversifying”, Suhaiymah’s goals involve dismantling systems in order to build anew.
Due to her experiences, the duties incumbent upon her as a Muslim, and a political education from her mother, grandmother, women of colour and radical thinkers from across the world, Suhaiymah is dedicated to the total transformation of the current order which is unrealistic, unsustainable and unlivable for the majority of the world’s population. She is adamant that the safety of human beings must always come before the security of capital, nations, borders and states, and the only real safety lies in submission of the soul to God.
Suhaiymah outright rejects the global system of white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism that make the majority of lives on earth unlivable. That system cannot be reformed or redeemed. She does not adhere to essentialist logics, racist legislation, neoliberal social norms or illegitimate authority and is committed singularly to justice (no matter who it is for/against). She ascribes to a radical politic of hope also known as submission to Allah. To submit to Allah is to believe that we live in a miraculous world and to have faith that transformation is always possible, because Allah is always greater.
“Oh you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest you swerve, and if you distort justice or decline to do justice, verily Allah is well-acquainted with all that you do.” - Quran, Surah al-Nisa: 135