Helpful resources (hopefully) from me to you
To submit solely to the authority of the Creator of everything (to be Muslim), means I have a duty to fight for justice and resist oppression, tyranny and coercion wherever it is found on earth because that is what is asked of me. Speaking truth, recognising our interdependence, and exposing and resisting injustice are inherent parts of practicing Islam and attempting to attain Allah’s pleasure. Muslim is a doing word, a praxis.
We change the world through changing the ways we think about the world.
It is only by understanding that the world is the way it is due to historical processes, decisions and political needs, that we understand we are able to change it. The world has not always been this way, we do not have to fatalistically accept it and we have the power to change it. Understanding and learning about our conditions is therefore crucial for resistance and transformation.
Education is about questioning, listening, acknowledging wrong, understanding, and naming things. Political education is about learning from one another and our conditions, exploring them, questioning them, defining them, and in doing so, understanding that our struggles are interconnected. It is not “once we do this”, but as we do this, that we liberate ourselves, our minds and our worlds. There is no theory without praxis.
Reading List
I have made the below ‘reading list’ because people often ask me for readings that have informed me. I have tried to include a range of texts that have driven or inspired me over the years either through the questions they raise, the stories they tell, the ease with which they explain a complex concept, or the ethic they are rooted in. Take them as you will, and remember that all human authors write from their own contexts; nothing should be accepted without question or taken for granted. Some texts are more accessible than others, and links are included where PDFs are available.
Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’
Sunaina Maira, “Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists and US Orientalisms
Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
Anti-Blackness resource
This is a resource of text and video/audio resources I compiled in May 2020 primarily for people of south Asian heritages in the UK (but other non-Black POC potentially) to help with unlearning White supremacy and also therefore disinvesting from anti-Blackness in order to build strong anti-racist, anti-imperialist solidarities.
Countering counter-extremism
In June 2029 I led the wide-scale boycott of the Bradford Literature Festival to resist and object to their acceptance of structurally racist Counter Extremism funding through the Building A Stronger Britain Together fund which should not be funding anything, let alone the arts and literature sector. I wrote a statement and explanation about why I was withdrawing which can be read in full here. In it I explained,
The government’s Counter Extremism strategy relies on the premise that Muslims are predisposed to violence and therefore require monitoring and surveillance, rather than that the material and systemic conditions of economic, racial and Islamophobic violence need addressing as causes of individual perpetration of violence. If BLF were connected to BSBT then there was a suggestion that access to literature/something like a literature festival can ‘reduce the risk of radicalisation’, which in turn reinforces the logic that the onus for ending disenfranchisement and political violence lies with individuals, not the state or institutions that create the conditions and context of that violence (austerity, foreign policy, structural racism, surveillance). I therefore contacted the BLF organisers to understand further
I further appeared on radio and TV to explain the danger of counter extremism, as well as expanding on reasons in the Guardian (here). Along with other organisers, the community came together for an alternative festival where we discussed how we can protect ourselves from surveillance.
It is crucial for us to know about the ways our community organisations, arts spaces and more are entangled with the Home Office’s surveillance programmes, and how this limits our capacity to be ourselves freely and especially to engage in critique and protest.
Find out more about Counter Extremism funding streams here, as well as the list of organisations funded by Building a Stronger Britain Together.
The ‘integration strategy’ is also deeply bound up in the same racism and Islamophobia as Counter Extremism more broadly. Do read this important report on the Integrated Communities strategy’s racism here.
I write about this boycott and these themes more in my book, Tangled in Terror (2022).
#StuckinPakistan
Since the UK government are unlikely to retain public records on this, I am taking this space to record some of the most intensive, draining and urgent organising I was involved in in 2020. There is also a complete six page document of the written submission I sent to the Parliamentary Committee investigating the government’s 2020 COVID-19 response, here.
In March 2020 I became stranded in Pakistan with my elderly grandmother due to COVID-19 border closures. As a result, on the 24th March 2020 I began to contact, collate and coordinate 1400+ British nationals also stranded there through the email account I set up: stuckinpak@gmail.com. We launched a media campaign and lobbied MPs and then Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, in coordination with MPs like Afzal Khan MP who persistently wrote to the Foreign Secretary and shadow Foreign Secretary. We demanded that the UK Foreign Office and British High Commission charter repatriation flights for a disproportionately elderly and high-risk group of people: British Pakistanis.
British Pakistanis made up a large group of overseas Brits at the time and despite evidence that many of those abroad were high-risk due to economic and health constraints, as well as being predominantly low-income and disproportionately diabetic, it took three full weeks (21 days) into the emergency for the UK government to arrange charter flights. We know that those of Pakistani heritage in the UK live disproportionately below the poverty line (48% in the 2011 census). This had a huge impact on many people who could not afford the new flights out of the country that the High Commission relied on for three weeks: flights at £800-900 from PIA. I personally set up a fundraiser and helped coordinate applications from many who needed funds that showed they earned <£9000 per person and could not afford flights out. We also know British Pakistanis have disproportionate health needs when it comes to diabetes and heart disease (diabetes was 3 times more prevalent in Pakistani men, and 5 times more in Pakistani women according to the Health Survey for England in 2004). Under UK health guidelines people with diabetes should have been self-isolating at home.
Over the three week period it took for charter flights to finally be arranged – and up to two months later – I made 20 media appearances, wrote templates for hundreds of letters to MPs, liased with politicians, was asked to compile details and information of people to give to the High Commission, collaborated with charity, Rehabilitation Response to get medical supplies to people who had run out, and collaborated to raise and distribute funds for those who would not afford alternative travel plans.
We are still seeking long-term justice and accountability for the government’s incompetence at best and gross negligence amounting to institutional racism at worst. The Foreign Office and British High Commissions’ three-week long response to putting on chartered flights was a life-threatening length of time for many in the COVID pandemic who had run out of medication. The assumptions underpinning this process, the lack of transparency, lack of urgent medical or economic aid and lack of support in accessing flights home were culturally essentialist and racially biased.