MUSLIMS DON’T MATTER

Author: Sayeeda Warsi
Publisher: The Bridge Street Press
Format: Hardback
Pages: 168
Source: The Bridge Street Press

Reviewer: Jamila Sherif

Human Rights Watch warns that Britain is a divided society, and we cannot ignore the racist and Islamophobic misinformation that fuelled far right riots across the country, with mobs attacking mosques last year. It cautions that by adopting Islamophobic rhetoric, politicians have ‘mainstreamed’ Islamophobia and emboldened extremists. In the current context, Sayeeda Warsi’s Muslims Don’t Matter is essential but stark reading for all those who strive for a multicultural and tolerant British society where all citizens feel they belong regardless of ethnicity or faith. The author resigned from David Cameron’s cabinet in 2014 over its morally indefensible policies towards Palestine.

Warsi certainly succeeds in causing the reader to feel outrage about the current marginalisation of Muslims and rising Islamophobia or ‘anti-Muslim racism’ in all sectors of British society. Warsi describes how Muslims in Britain are treated as the ‘the other, the outsider, the unusual, and unable to be accommodated within the mainstream’. She details many examples of exclusion and disengagement with Muslims and most mainstream Muslim organisations, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, leading to their isolation and detachment from consultation. She powerfully describes how Muslims are denied participation as ‘policy is not something Muslims help to shape; it is weaponised as something against us.’

She details the stigmatisation of Muslims by politicians, in particular ‘Gove’s obsession with Muslims’ that led to the Trojan Horse Scandal, the defunding of the Srebrenica programme (an initiative to commemorate the Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims in 1995 which Warsi had set up in 2012) and far-reaching discriminatory policies such as placing the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy on a statutory footing. She explains that public sector workers were expected ‘to assess and determine indicators of radicalisation’. Warsi describes how the Prevent duty created a ‘cancel culture’, ‘pushing Muslims out of the public domain for fear of being tarnished as an extremist’. She tells us how more recently Prevent has even been used to silence young people wanting to show solidarity with Palestinian children. Amnesty International’s 2023 report ‘This is the thought police’: The Prevent duty and its chilling effect on human right’ concludes ‘the violations documented lead to a stark conclusion: the UK must scrap the Prevent strategy in order to comply with its international human rights obligations.’

Warsi explains the British Islamic Medical Association’ concern that NHS doctors were being disciplined for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, leading many to feel ‘stifled and silenced’. The war in Gaza, highlighted for Warsi, the utter ‘dismissal of Muslim concerns across all sectors of British society’. Indeed, we witnessed peaceful protests calling for a ceasefire labelled as ‘hate marches’ by Braverman, the Home Secretary at the time.

Warsi demonstrates how Muslims are judged according to standards other communities are not and the book’s first chapter describes a useful Islamophobia Litmus test. She calls out racist tropes and stereotypes such as ‘Muslim grooming gangs’. Warsi exposes how successive Home Secretaries initially refused to make public the Home Office report that found there were no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged such crimes. Instead, Home Secretaries continued to falsely propagate such notions of grooming gangs, whipping up an environment of hostility to Muslims and the subsequent killing of Muslims by far-right attacks such as the Finsbury Mosque attack during the month of Ramadan in 2017. She explains how the stereotyping and stigmatising of a whole community demonises all Muslims and perpetuates Islamophobia.

The chapter ‘Blind Injustice’ exposes how the stripping of Shamima Begum’s citizenship is against international law and the state has failed British Muslims. Over the last twenty years citizen-stripping has escalated as the law has created different classes of citizenship. She argues effectively that if we want to make citizenship a punishment for a crime it should apply to all those who engage in such crimes, rather than it being dependent on heritage.

In the final chapter, Warsi expresses ‘her great faith in my country and its people’ and believes ‘ordinary people will embrace British Muslims’ if there is a determined effort by those in leadership to address Islamophobia and end culture wars. To achieve this, she calls for an inquiry into the Trojan Horse affair, repealing of the Prevent statutory duty, the return of Shamima Begum (and all the other women and children) and the same class of citizenship for all British citizens. She calls on the Labour government to formally adopt the definition of Islamophobia and end to the government policy of disengagement with Muslims, welcoming them back into the mainstream of policy making. Warsi appeals to us all to challenge media narratives that vilify Muslims and demand that Islamophobia is taken as seriously as antisemitism. This book is a frightening and urgent wake-up call that cannot be ignored. ‘It’s time for Muslims to Matter’ she concludes.

February 2025