I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting racism in times of national security

By Manchester University Press

In times of heightened national security, scholars and activists from the communities under suspicion often attempt to alert the public to the more complex stories behind the headlines. But when they raise questions about the government, military and police policy, these individuals are routinely shut down and accused of being terrorist sympathisers or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is immense pressure to condemn what society at large fears. This collection explains how the expectation to condemn has emerged, tracking it against the normalisation of racism, and explores how writers manage to subvert expectations as part of their commitment to anti-racism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526151469

Book preview

I Refuse to Condemn

I REFUSE TO CONDEMN

RESISTING RACISM IN TIMES OF NATIONAL SECURITY

Edited by ASIM QURESHI

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5147 6 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

To

Shaqira, Aniqah, Aaliyah, Jamal, Shakeel, Amaan, Lili, Hanna, Zahraa, Haytham, Duhaa, Zakariyah, Khadija, Aadam, Ibrahim, Ibraheem, Isa, Aaishah, Sulayman, Musa, Maya, Asiya, Aayah and Ilyas

Fiza

Hannah, Inayat, Maria, Madihah, Samihah, Adilah, Wajihah and Yusuf

Aya, Yaqeen and Ameen

Ammara Mayya

Nusaybah, Faatimah and Ayub

Maryam, Abdulhameed, Saleem, Ali, Sara, Eesa, Zain, Sophia, Musa and Akeem

Sawera, Yusuf, Eshaan, Laibah, Hina, Imaan, Zahra, Amman and Sahil

Aneesah Aduke Olorunkemi

Sumaiyyah and Saifur Rehmaan

Ayana and Amerah

Sienna

Taalia

Yara, Rayan and Jana

Idriis

The words written in this book are by those who are fighting for your future. Honour them and keep them in your prayers, always.

CONTENTS

List of contributors

Introduction: ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow’ – Asim Qureshi

I How did we get here?

1Remaking rule #1: ‘I utterly refuse to condemn …’ – Shenaz Bunglawala

2They needed us, and now they are terrified – Fatima Rajina

3The four stages of moral panic – Adam Elliott-Cooper

4The duty to see, the yearning to be seen – Tarek Younis

II Resisting the structure

5Refusing to condemn as a political act – Remi Joseph-Salisbury

6Navigating refusal within the academy – Shereen Fernandez and Azeezat Johnson 90

7Randomly selected: close encounters of the hive mind – Shafiuddean Choudry

8Guilty without a crime – Saffa Mir

9The struggle of a Muslim terror ‘suspect lawyer’ – Fahad Ansari

III Resisting the personal

10 The (im)possible Muslim – Yassir Morsi

11 The racialised ‘go-to Muslim’ – Sadia Habib

12 Writing for the kids – Nadya Ali

13 It is Allah who condemns – Cyrus McGoldrick

IV Resisting the performance

14 Is this radical? Am I radical? – Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

15 Grappling with shadows – Lowkey

16 That’s because I’ve read – Hoda Katebi

17 My art is for my people – Aamer Rahman

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Notes

Further reading

Index

CONTRIBUTORS

NADYA ALI

Nadya Ali is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex. Her research examines the UK’s counter-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, and its racialised and gendered government of Muslim populations since 9/11. Her work intersects with the wider themes of border politics, citizenship and British (post-)imperial identity formation in the War on Terror. She is currently engaged in a research project exploring the intersectional politics of austerity and Islamophobia, supported by De Montfort University’s Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA).

FAHAD ANSARI

Fahad Ansari is the principal solicitor and director of Riverway Law, a niche firm specialising in immigration and nationality law. Fahad also works as a consultant at Duncan Lewis Solicitors. He is regularly instructed in cases involving national security such as deprivation of citizenship, passport confiscations, naturalisation, exclusion and deportation of convicted terrorists. He was listed as a ‘Recommended Lawyer’ in the 2020 edition of the Legal 500 for Immigration: Human Rights, Appeals and Overstay and Civil Liberties and Human Rights. Fahad has been involved in community work around the War on Terror and Islamophobia for almost two decades.

SHENAZ BUNGLAWALA

Shenaz Bunglawala is the deputy director of the Research and Strategy Unit, Penny Appeal, and formerly assistant director at Aziz Foundation. She has led research into Islamophobia, racial and religious equality and the impact of counter-terrorism legislation on British Muslim communities for more than a decade. She is a trustee of the Christian Muslim Forum and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

SHAFIUDDEAN CHOUDRY

Shafiuddean Choudry is a career technologist and co-founder of the Riz Test. He holds a degree in computer science and has fifteen years’ experience in the tech industry, working on process automation, big data and digital transformation projects. Having taught himself to write code at a young age, Shafiuddean has always been fascinated with the way technology can be used for the greater good. He has spoken at several events on the importance of diversity in tech and recently went on to co-found the Riz Test to measure how Muslims are portrayed in the arts.

ADAM ELLIOTT-COOPER

Adam Elliott-Cooper received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His current research focuses on urban displacement in London. He has previously worked as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, and a researcher in the Department of Philosophy, University College London. He has also worked as an associate researcher in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. Adam received his undergraduate degree in politics from the University of Nottingham and his MSc in Globalisation and Development from SOAS, University of London.

SHEREEN FERNANDEZ

Shereen Fernandez completed her PhD while acting as a teaching associate at QMUL, University of London. Prior to this, Shereen was a primary school teacher in London. Her PhD research looked at how schools, teachers and Muslim parents in London engage with the Prevent duty and British values.

SADIA HABIB

Sadia Habib taught English Literature and Language in secondary school and college. She completed her MA in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was later awarded a PhD for her research studies on the teaching and learning of Britishness. She recently co-founded the Riz Test to measure representation of Muslims in film and on television. She currently works at Manchester Museum on a project engaging young people with the heritage sector.

AZEEZAT JOHNSON

Azeezat Johnson is a social geographer interested in developing conversations about Black (and) Muslim geographies which push against the racialisation of bodies as Other to a neutralised White self. Her PhD research (completed at the University of Sheffield in 2017) grew from this vein of thinking: it used the clothing practices of Black Muslim women in Britain to explore how the performance of one’s identity changes as we move through and interact with different objects, bodies, gazes and spaces. This pushed against a static reading of Black Muslim women (which are all too often constructed as either Black or Muslim). It also moved beyond the hypervisibility of the headscarf within academic and popular debates by pointing to the multitude of different presentations that are used.

REMI JOSEPH-SALISBURY

Remi Joseph-Salisbury completed his PhD at the University of Leeds in 2016 before working as a senior lecturer at Leeds Beckett University for two years. In 2018, Remi moved to the University of Manchester to take up the position of Presidential Fellow in Ethnicity and Inequalities. Remi’s first book, Black Mixed-Race Men, was published by Emerald Publishing in 2018. His co-edited collection, The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence, was published in November 2018. He has published in national and international journals on topics covering his broad interests including race, racism, anti-racism, the ‘post-racial’, mixedness, masculinities and education.

HODA KATEBI

Hoda Katebi is the Chicago-based angry daughter of Iranian immigrants. She is the voice behind JooJoo Azad, the political fashion platform hailed from the BBC to The New York Times to the pages of Vogue; author of the book Tehran Streetstyle, a celebration and documentation of illegal fashion in Iran; host of #BecauseWeveRead, a radical international book club with over thirty chapters internationally; and founder of Blue Tin Production, an all-women immigrant and refugee-run clothing manufacturing co-operative in Chicago. Hoda is an abolitionist and community organiser, previously part of campaigns to end surveillance programmes and police militarisation. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2016 where her research explored the intersections of fashion, gender and the state in Iran, and will be starting law school in the autumn of 2020. She runs on saffron ice cream and coloniser tears.

LOWKEY

Lowkey is a rapper and campaigner and has released his first album in eight years – the highly anticipated and epic Soundtrack to the Struggle 2. It acts as a sequel to his last official album, 2011’s widely acclaimed Soundtrack to the Struggle, which at the time BBC’s Charlie Sloth described as ‘the best album of the year, no probably the best album of the past few years period!’. After a hiatus which saw the British-Iraqi hip hop artist take time off to focus on studies and activism, Lowkey has returned to a different world politically and a country in a state of flux. Despite this, his focus on issues around race, war, global poverty and politics endures.

SUHAIYMAH MANZOOR-KHAN

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, spoken-word poet, speaker and educator invested in unlearning the modalities of knowledge she has internalised, disrupting power relations and interrogating narratives around race/ism, gender(ed oppression), Islamophobia, state violence, knowledge production and (de)coloniality. She read History at the University of Cambridge, and holds an MA in Postcolonial Studies from SOAS, University of London. She regularly writes, speaks, performs and holds workshops on Islamophobia, racism, feminism and poetry both nationally and internationally.

CYRUS MCGOLDRICK

Cyrus McGoldrick is a Muslim born in the US of Irish and Iranian descent. He graduated with a BA in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University in 2010 and an MA in Civilisation Studies at Ibn Haldun University in 2018, and is now a PhD candidate. His publications include the book of poetry I of the Garden (2014), a chapter on the political thought of Kalim Siddiqui in al-Din wa-l-Insan wa-l-Ala (ed. Heba Raouf Ezzat, 2017) and a translation from Turkish to English of Recep Şentürk’s Malcolm X: The Struggle for Human Rights (forthcoming). He has worked for a number of Islamic social and human rights organisations, including the New York Chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations and the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and continues to serve as an advisor and consultant for several American NGOs, including the Aafia Foundation and the media start-up Outpost.

SAFFA MIR

Saffa Mir is a solicitor who graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in Law. During her time at university she served as the vice-president of student affairs in the Islamic Society and co-founded campaigns including Preventing Prevent at Manchester. She was elected community officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union and later as vice-president of student affairs at the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the representative body of Muslim Students in further and higher education across the UK. Saffa has spoken extensively across the press and in Parliament, focusing on the experiences of Muslim students in higher education.

YASSIR MORSI

Yassir Morsi has a PhD from the University of Melbourne in Political Science and Islamic Studies and is an honours graduate in Psychology from Monash University. His research engages with a broad range of critical race theorists in dealing with the Muslim question. Yassir writes as a columnist for The Guardian, Australia, and is the author of Radical Skin, Moderate Masks. He is a lecturer at La Trobe University in Politics and Philosophy and a recipient of the Australian Muslim Achievement Awards for Muslim Man of the Year, 2015, for his role in community teaching and activism.

ASIM QURESHI

Asim Qureshi (editor) graduated in Law (LLB Hons, LLM), specialising in International Law and Islamic Law. He completed his PhD in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent. He is the research director at the advocacy group CAGE, and since 2003 has specialised in investigating the impact of counter-terrorism practices worldwide. Asim is also the author of Rules of the Game: Detention, Deportation, Disappearance (Hurst, Columbia UP, 2009) and A Virtue of Disobedience (Unbound & Byline, 2019). Since 2010, he has been advising legal teams involved in defending terrorism trials in the US and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

AAMER RAHMAN

Aamer Rahman is a writer and stand-up comedian whose work focuses on race and the War on Terror. He has performed sold-out shows at some of the world’s largest festivals such as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe. He is best known for his stand-up pieces ‘Reverse Racism’ and ‘Is it OK to Punch Nazis?’ and has been listed as one of the Guardian’s Top 10 live comedy shows. His work is used at universities around the world to teach on politics and race.

FATIMA RAJINA

Fatima Rajina completed her MA in Islamic Societies and Cultures at SOAS, University of London, and went on to complete a PhD after successfully securing a Nohoudh scholarship with the Centre of Islamic Studies, SOAS. Fatima’s work looks at British Bangladeshi Muslims and their changing identifications and perceptions of dress and language. She is currently working on a project, Lutonians, along with a local photographer to document the everyday lived experiences of people from Luton. She has also worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, looking at policing and counter-terrorism. Fatima was also a teaching fellow at SOAS, and, most recently, worked as a lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University London. She previously worked as a research fellow in the Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education.

TAREK YOUNIS

Tarek Younis holds a lecturing position in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University. His previous research explored the racialisation of Muslims as a result of statutory counter-terrorism policies (Prevent) in healthcare. He writes on the securitisation and racism of the psy disciplines; institutionalised Islamophobia; and the impact of culture, religion, globalisation and security policies on mental health interventions.

INTRODUCTION: ‘YOU KNOW NOTHING, JON SNOW’

Asim Qureshi

ET TU, JON SNOW?

The much-loved Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow is interviewing me and asks:

Do you now condemn what he does?¹

The one question I never expected of him. I’ve never felt so completely undone. I mean … it’s Jon Snow. I’ve shared his videos umpteen times on social media due to his wellregarded reporting.

He’s asking me about whether or not I condemn the actions of Muhammad Emwazi, the man who became the infamous ISIS murderer Jihadi John. Just prior to my interview segment, Channel 4 News plays a pre-recorded video with a female former teacher of Emwazi, who praised her student without any demands on her to condemn. Now, thinking back through it, what separated me from the teacher was my very visible adherence to Islam.

As I watch back over the video today, I can see the palpable look of amazement in my eyes and the shock in my gestures. It’s not that this is the first time someone has asked me this type of question, but hearing it escape from the lips of Jon Snow took me aback. I explained to him that he is someone I admire and that I’m troubled by this line of questioning, but he insisted that he just wanted a straight answer, even if I was offended.

I try my best to explain that CAGE² as an organisation, and I as an individual, worked tirelessly to save the life of the aid worker Alan Henning (who was kidnapped by ISIS and killed by Emwazi), and that we felt the pain of his death just like his family did. I try and reason with him that his question presupposes that my Muslim faith is the only reason why he is even interested in asking for my condemnation. He rejects this, though:

I don’t see you as a Muslim. I see you as part of a group involved in attempting to assist people who are in difficulty.

This does not make sense to me. I’ve never heard of this requirement from any advocacy group representing a very specific area of concern, being asked to condemn the violent actions of those outside of its remit. I make this point to Snow, that he wouldn’t ask anyone from Amnesty International or Liberty to condemn the future violence of a client they once represented. Snow suggests he would ask them the same, and because he is Jon Snow I concede and say that I condemn any form of arbitrary execution and violence. I am at pains not to say it in the language he demands – because I don’t want my life and work reduced to the notions of propriety that this White man demands. My life, my work, my ethics are caged through his fears of me, the Other.

You know nothing, Jon Snow.³

The famous line from Game of Thrones comes to me after the interview is over. He doesn’t know why this questioning is hurtful, why it fundamentally shifts my view of who he is and why this feels like losing a part of who I am – largely because I now know that even with Jon Snow, we cannot speak without first verifying our humanity. His startling lack of care towards offence that he might cause has real-world ramifications for me. Now, as I write in the same month as the interview five years on, I’m having the same palpitations that I’ve had ever since that interview ended. My heart rate is through the roof and I’m feeling the same nausea I did on leaving the set – that night he changed my physiology forever.

Encoded in my body was a desire to never relive that moment, and so every single time a news story attacks CAGE or me, my body re-experiences that trauma, transporting me back into that interview room. I try to intellectualise what is happening; I literally have a conversation in my own mind about how I know this is the body’s fight-or-flight system, trying to help me escape something that it previously didn’t like. To no avail, this is the new me now. Forever changed by Jon Snow’s insistence, that I assure him I condemn. I am fortunate in the sense that I have studied and been trained to recognise the psychological and physiological impact of trauma – so while I can do little about its physical reality, I am able to understand what is happening and not succumb to it. Unfortunately, there are many others who don’t have this knowledge, and so their relationship to re-experiencing such trauma is heightened.

In that period in February 2015, Jon Snow wasn’t the only commentator to mischaracterise me. The Daily Mail,⁴ The Telegraph,⁵ the then prime minister David Cameron⁶ and even the current prime minister Boris Johnson⁷ all seemed to suggest that my call to understand Emwazi’s actions within a wider context was somehow evidence that I condoned them. The media criticism felt vicious and few commentators⁸ sought to engage with what I had actually said at the time, rather than what was being inferred based on a racialised othering of my person and statements.

Since then, CAGE and I have been largely constructed based on this one moment by the right-wing and tabloid press, think-tanks and the politicians hostile to our calls against structural racism and for accountability. Their weaponisation of that moment has not only served as a means of attempting to invalidate our work, but also has had the knock-on effect of instilling fear into the wider Muslim community. This is all despite my own recognition of the mistakes I made during the period⁹ and an external review CAGE conducted of my messaging¹⁰ – publishing our findings in a unique act of accountability. The message is clear: if your accountability sits outside of pre-determined contours of the narrative the state permits, then the authorities will make life unbearable for you.

THE LANDSCAPE

Some may question why such a book is necessary. Indeed, when I invited others to take part in this volume, I was somewhat unsure of what might emerge on the other side. Would my experience with Jon Snow and others be something that they related to? What this volume does is to really centre how critiquing the expectation of condemnation is not merely an academic experience, but rather, for all those who have reflected on its meaning, that it has everyday implications for them. Perhaps one of the most surprising things about this volume is the way in which the contributors helped to complicate my own understanding of this deeply difficult subject – sometimes in ways that were extremely painful to read.

Few works have been written on the subject of condemnation, with perhaps the most well known being Todd H. Green’s Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn’t Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism, which draws together a compelling argument from a scholar outside of communities of colour on all the reasons why such calls for condemnation are not only incorrect, but are actually counter-productive to building cohesive relations between communities.¹¹ This point is also made by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in her 2017 book The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain, where the Tory politician highlights not only the problems with condemnation culture, but also the ways in which this is reserved for communities of colour, as no such expectation is made of the larger White society – for instance, when Tommy Mair murdered the British parliamentarian Joanne Cox due to his White nationalist beliefs.¹²

Of course, the irony of my experience with Muhammad Emwazi, the man I once described as ‘a beautiful young man’ before he became an ISIS executioner,