I felt compelled to write this after seeing a post on an extended family member’s status update about the escalation in Islamophobia and what to do about it if you are personally affected. They had provided a screenshot of the Tell Mama website, encouraging their followers to report to them. I immediately replied to the post and explained that I thought I was friends with Fiyaz until he blocked me for saying David Aaronovitch was an Islamophobe, that Tell Mama is a home office front intended to manage the Muslim response to all the attacks against them, and that Fiyaz Mughal is pro Israeli and actually an ex Muslim. He identifies as a Muslim to convince people he is trustworthy but he is doing the work of an OBE, maintaining the empire that killed our shared ancestors in a genocide.
There is a belief among Tory Muslims, the rich and privileged, that Muslim Jewish unity is only possible if Muslims submit to white supremacy and zionism. (In fact you can only be a victim of racism if you have first shown complete and total reverence to white supremacy, otherwise you deserve it). They internalised the narrative that Muslims are somehow uniquely savage and the world must be protected from them. Whenever I became wistful about returing to the homeland and building it up, Fiyaz would pop up to remind me that even with racism we have it far better here.. This argument would stand if we had not just witnessed the ongoing genocide of innocent women and children in Palestine, committed by zionists and endorsed by their white supremacist friends in the West. I’m sure if Isis or the Taliban had left premature newborn babies to suffocate and freeze to death, the entire Muslim world would already have paid the price. If Muslims really were as savage and parasitic as their oppressors, they would be in power surely?
I first came across Fiyaz on Twitter. I had put up my granddad’s old army papers and he had deciphered the barely legible script to reveal that my ancestors were Mughals. I said no, we are Qazi, and he said yes, your ancestors changed their names when the British decreed a genocide. He told me I looked just like the Mughal princesses in the locket miniatures and would show me when I accompanied him to the British museum. He said to me “your granddad is calling to you from beyond the grave” and even wrote to me about my unique ancestry and what that could mean for my place in the world. I threw myself behind Tell Mama, retweeting all of their tweets, believing it to be a crucial service at a time it was needed the most. However as I learnt more and more about my history, and remembered some of the things that hadn’t made sense when I had witnessed them growing up, I realised that the British only managed to do what they did to my ancestors because of a familial rift, where one set complained about the other and then used it as a pretext for invasion, occupation, sexual slavery and large scale theft. I learnt that true Mughals do not use the name Mughal for fear they will be executed, even after all this time, and those who do use the name are suspicious to say the least. I resolved to keep an eye on him. Once I saw him tell a Muslim brother to “go home if you don’t like it”. Fiyaz knows the impact these words have, even moreso when they are uttered by someone who should know better. I guess he knew I was onto him because he blocked me without a second thought when I pulled him up, only for the second time mind, for enabling Islamophobes like David Aaronovitch.
Tory Muslims like Fiyaz and Sayeeda Warsi did not get to where they are by being open and honest and challenging Islamophobia. Warsi herself used the attention she was getting for her views on Palestine to share a platform with unabashed Islamophobe and anti Black racist David Baddiel. These people are used to manipulating public opinion, they know how to pull in an audience and use it to normalise bigotry. If they are the ‘good’ Muslims and Jews we really are doomed. They do not do anything for free, or out of the goodness of their hearts, but personal progression. You always have to ask, what is in it for them?
True anti racists, true anti fascists have friends from all walks of life. Our solidarity is based on our shared humanity. We share our cultures, our faiths, we celebrate their similarities and learn from the differences. We do not believe in the superiority of any one faith or culture over another, we recognise we are all praying to the same God through our respective cultural lenses. We are living proof that there is no place for hierarchies where there is true camaraderie.
If you want to be a Tory, that’s your prerogative, but don’t call yourself a Muslim, you walking oxymoron.
Left at the Lights 