“So, I’m done with apologising”, begins Sayeeda, Baroness Warsi’s book Muslims Don’t Matter (2024) and that is how she began her Q&A session at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival on Friday 25 October.
Sayeeda Warsi is probably the most well-known Muslim woman in Britain today. She is a lawyer, and a member of the House of Lords. She was co-chair of the Conservative Party from 2010-2012 and a cabinet member in the Cameron-Clegg coalition. She announced she was resigning the whip of the Conservative Party in the House of Lords in September 2024.
I had always been aware of Warsi but it was her appearance on BBC4’s Winter Walks during lockdown that endeared me to her warmth and her connection with her roots in Yorkshire.
Muslims Don’t Matter exposes Islamophobia
On the Literary Festival stage, she went on to describe her ancestry. She was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, to immigrant parents from Pakistan and her grandfathers both served in the British Indian Army. Her father started working in the mill, then became a bus driver. He ran a taxi service and she related childhood memories of him regularly being beaten up at weekends by his fares. He eventually managed a successful bed-making company.
Baroness Warsi’s book is a polemic driven by her personal experience of Islamophobia, but also demonstrates through specific examples the insidious creep of racism, not just by white people against people of colour, but by people of other ethnicities or religions against those they perceive as different. The stereotyping of Muslims is an example of this and it was exemplified by a comment from an audience member who said that if someone mentioned Muslims or Islam, she thought of “burqas, Sharia law and terrorism”. Baroness Warsi calmly unpicked this, explaining the stereotyping in the media which led to this misunderstanding. Do we assume that all Muslims think the same? Does every Muslim woman wear a burqa? This is stereotyping. She also mentioned the debate about ‘Muslim grooming gangs’. This issue has been exploited by the far-right. Sexual abuse by white ‘grooming gangs’ is never seen as “an opportunity for a deep reflection” of these activities by males who happen to be white, yet Muslims have their religion highlighted and are “held up as evidence of the savagery of their race”.
The creep towards acceptability of prejudice
Back in 2011 Baroness Warsi first started raising her concerns about how Islamophobia was somehow becoming acceptable, ‘passing the dinner table test’. It was the first time that a Cabinet minister had made a major speech on anti-Muslim prejudice. She was concerned that policy-making had “started to exceptionalise the way we engaged with, viewed and judged British Muslims: they were held to a higher standard than everyone else.” One of the principal arguments for the ‘dinner table test’ was the division of Muslims into ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ as though this designation could be foisted upon a British Muslim population of four million and a world-wide one of two billion.
Baroness Warsi told an anecdote that was about the attitude to different sacred scriptures. Much like Jewish and Christian religious texts, Islamic scripture taken out of context can be deemed alien. A couple of Danish pranksters covered a copy of the Bible and began to read from it as though it came from the Quran. Their largely European audience reacted negatively until the true nature of the book was revealed.
The Southport riots
Muslims Don’t Matter was almost complete and had gone off to the editor when the terrible stabbings of small children in Southport took place in July 2024. Warsi requested the return of her manuscript as she felt she had to respond to the rioting that took place after misinformation about the identity of the attacker was spread online.
Liverpool Crown Court disclosed the attacker’s identity, despite him being a minor at that point, to counter speculation and misinformation. False claims that the attacker was Muslim and/or an asylum seeker had been spread on social media. The Southport Mosque was attacked with rocks and bottles. Over the next few days the rioting extended to other towns and cities across England, with the most severe taking place over the weekend of 3 and 4 August when homes and businesses belonging to immigrants were attacked and hotels housing asylum seekers were set on fire.
Warsi ends her book with a clarion call for action to heal divisions and end the culture wars. She writes: “It’s time for Muslims to matter”.
