Muslims Don’t Matter by Sayeeda Warsi. The Bridge Street Press, 2024. eISBN 978-0-349-13648-6
Baroness Warsi, elevated to the House of Lords in 2007, former co-chairwoman of the Conservative Party, and the first Muslim to serve as a cabinet minister in the UK, resigned the Tory Whip in September. Now unfettered by party loyalty, she has her say in this book. She is an eloquent polemicist:
So, I’m done with apologising […] I’m done with being held accountable for the actions of any one of the almost two billion people in the world who follow the faith I was born into. I am done with having to explain and contextualise every word of a seventh-century religious book. I am done with appeasement, hoping that the climate would improve, that some in the media and politics will eventually tire of feeding the beast of division.
Eloquent though this is, some readers will not sympathise with Warsi’s assumption of victim status. My own first awareness of Islam as a divisive force in UK society came when the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the novelist Salman Rushdie to death for writing The Satanic Verses. Before that, though I had been dismayed by the violence and hatred in the Quran, I assumed, as Warsi does, that Islam’s seventh-century sacred text is harmless enough. I imagined that Muslims nowadays are rational and modern.
In my case, it was not “the media and politics” that brought me up against “the beast of division”. It was the general applause with which the fatwa of February 14, 1989, was met in UK mosques. Muslims in Britain, it seemed, agreed that Rushdie does deserve to be killed. On that day my world changed irrevocably. From my birth at the end of the Second World War, I had lived in a country where freedom of thought was effortlessly dispelling the last feeble remnants of religious control. The success of the deeply blasphemous Life of Brian in 1979 seemed to usher in an era where censorship had been dispelled for ever. But now, ten years later, I suddenly found myself in a country where a novelist whose work I enjoyed, and which I was at the time teaching to university students, was forced to hide in fear of his life by the edict of an uneducated “ayatollah”, a new word to me. Khomeini’s sterile creed had barged into the centre of my culture and taken control. And his ideology was far more aggressive than the Christianity which had until then been the only religion I needed to consider. The word “apostasy” forced its way back into my modern vocabulary having until then been an archaism I had seen only in partisan Christian descriptions of a fourth-century emperor as “Julian the Apostate”. How does Warsi imagine a reader like me will respond to her polemic?
There is an empty hole at the centre of her book, a hole which should be filled by Islam as universally understood across the world by Muslims, non-Muslims, and ex-Muslims. This Islam is centred on the Quran and the prophet Mohammed. Warsi twice makes the point that “Muslims” are a diverse group of “nearly two billion people worldwide, all of whom have very different and distinct cultures”. True enough. But these culturally diverse people all follow the Quran. And is this not the problem? Warsi maintains that Islam is perfectly consonant with the British values of democracy and individual rights. But when it was suggested on Twitter (X) that it is easier for her to make this argument if the “important debate” she has initiated excludes reference to the Quran or Mohammed, she resorted to blocking. Indeed, the words “Quran” and “Mohammed” are virtually absent from her essay. It is a truly impressive achievement to have written 144 pages about being a Muslim with so slight a mention of the Quran (two) or the Prophet Mohammed (four).
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Warsi tells us that she intends to address “difficult” questions. In fact, she much prefers her questions to be easy. A difficult question (indeed the difficult question) for a Muslim assimilated, like Warsi, into British society, is how it is possible to reconcile British values, “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”, with Mohammed’s anti-democratic totalitarian ideology. Warsi quotes Michael Gove’s observation that about 50% of British people feel “there is a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of British society” (the YouGov survey cites 55%). She deplores Nigel Farage’s comment in the 2024 election that “a growing number” of Muslims “do not subscribe to British values” and “loathe what we stand for”. She cites Mark Steyn’s assertion that “Muslims are plotting to take over Europe”, as elaborated on in Lights Out (2009). In defence of these commentators, social media will readily supply videos of Muslims in the streets of European cities, or in the masjids of Birmingham or Bradford or Manchester, who explicitly tell us that they intend to impose sharia law on us, by force if necessary. It was only three months ago that Anjem Choudary, the most famous proponent of aggressive jihadism in the UK, was finally sent to prison for life.
In Quran 9:5, believers are told to kill all “pagans”, not “of the book”. All are to die unless they convert, except Jews and Christians who share with Muslims the Abrahamic prophetic tradition. ISIS followed this instruction to the letter in their genocide against the Yazidis in 2014. Quran 5:51 warns believers not to befriend Jews or Christians, who are “wrongdoing folk” (Quran translations by Marmaduke Pickthall). In 2017 the Borough Market killers left an English-language Quran in their flat open at “a martyrdom verse”, 9:111 or 4:74: “Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” (This detail seems now to have been deleted from social media. I can no longer find it). Is there not something dishonest about Warsi’s casual dismissal of the atrocities committed in the name of the sacred book of Islam as irrelevant to a peace-loving, law-abiding Muslim like herself? In her catalogue of Islamophobes we find the journal Charlie Hebdo, which “published what many regarded as offensive drawings of the Prophet Mohammed”. This neutral description is her only comment. Some readers might regard Warsi’s failure to explain whether she herself finds the cartoons offensive, or to mention the bloodthirsty murders of journalists at the Charlie Hebdo Office in Paris in 2015, as more offensive than any satirical cartoon could be.
What is Warsi’s view of the central text of the faith into which she was born? Does her Islam include praying in a mosque? Is she perhaps entirely secular, like Sajid Javid, who was raised with a Pakistani Muslim “family heritage”, but does “not practise any religion”? Is she a Muslim in culture but not ideology? Or does she have an ideological commitment to Islam? It is impossible to find the answers to these questions in her book.
The Islam which Warsi depicts is chiefly a matter of the Ramadan festival, distinctive clothing, and other cultural practices. She deplores Rowan Atkinson’s comment that Boris Johnson’s comparison of burka-clad women to letter-boxes is a “pretty good” joke which needs “no apology”. She mentions her very British upbringing in Dewsbury. She appreciates Adil Ray’s brilliant television sitcom Citizen Khan and the fiction of the Bangladeshi-British author, Monica Ali.
She is proud of the part she played in the establishment of sharia-compliant banking in the UK, in which no interest is paid. She is particularly hostile towards Prevent, to which she refers as a “toxic and by now failing policy”. The atrocities of 7/7/05 and Manchester Arena, the murders of Lee Rigby, Asad Shah, and David Amess, as well as the intimidations at Batley and Wakefield where four schoolboys received death threats are not mentioned anywhere in her book. So in her world it does indeed seem that Prevent can have no other purpose than the harassment of an innocent minority. She ignores its declared purpose: to identify the next Siddique Khan, Khuram Butt, or Salman Abedi before he commits the next atrocity.
One of the disconcerting features of Warsi’s book is her highlighting of issues under the heading “Islamophobia” which are more usually encountered from the opposite perspective. Anyone who follows social media, for instance, will be familiar with the stream of reports of masjids which, under the legal cover of the “charitable” purpose of promoting religion, host imams who instruct us about the position of women in Islam, or the duties of wives. One imam asks us whether we would be ready to cut off the hand of our daughter if she committed theft, as the Prophet said he was. There have been recent examples of highly misogynistic sermons delivered at Mohammedi Masjid, Bradford (subsequently removed), and at Green Lane Masjid, Birmingham. But the only suppression of Muslim women Warsi mentions is that imposed by the Islamophobic host society: “Muslim women are often spoken about, spoken at, or frozen out”. It is, apparently, Islamophobic non-Muslims who are the primary agent of the effacement of these women, not as many mistakenly believe, Islamic custom derived from Quran 4:34, which advises on the beating of wives.
It is useful for Warsi’s victim status and indignant tone to omit from her discussion of the one universal unifying feature of Islam: Mohammed’s sacred book. Islam is, is it not, a religion founded in the seventh century by a warlord who committed atrocities and owned many sex slaves captured in battle? Is it not also an ideology with one single infallible leader, which resorts to violence against those who refuse to submit, rejects democracy in favour of the divinely inspired leadership of a caliph, holds that women must under all circumstances obey their male guardians, and hates Jews? Until recently such views would have been recognisable as “far-right”. In our current society, perverted by the Labour Party’s need to woo conservative Muslim voters, they have become “left-wing”. Perhaps Warsi would reject this version of Islam as a caricature. But she never explains her interpretation of this text, so it remains unclear what, for instance, she finds controversial in Dawkins’ contrast between the Quran and the “decent” ideology of the New Testament.
Warsi is not an overly scrupulous writer. Sometimes her passionate bias leads her into disingenuousness which can only be deliberate. She gives a foreshortened account of the events surrounding Michael Gove’s dismissal in 2022 of the “senior Imam” Qari Asim MBE from his post as “Islamophobia Consultant” to the Conservative government. Warsi relates that Gove, in her view one of the most pernicious of Islamophobes, “unceremoniously dismissed him via a letter in the media”. In her eyes this is yet another example of the Islam-hatred which infects the British establishment. But she is being economical with the truth. When the Shia film The Lady of Heaven was advertised to be shown in Birmingham cinemas in June 2022, Asim’s sectarian Sunni beliefs came into play, and he openly sympathised with the violent threats against any cinema which showed this film. Its portrayal of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, was blasphemous to Sunnis. Its script, indeed, was written by a Shia Muslim cleric. Asim supported calls for the Government to ban it. In the event, this violent intimidation worked and cinemas withdrew the film. Gove’s letter of dismissal accused Asim of “a clear effort to restrict artistic expression” and giving support to “street protests which have fomented religious hatred”. This was not an example, as Warsi presents it, of Gove’s deep-rooted irrational “phobia” against Islam. Gove refused to take sides in the anachronistic, parochial politics of sectarian Islam. He acted on behalf of the government of the United Kingdom, whose inhabitants are at liberty to follow any religion or none.
Nor is Warsi above making casual, non-committal references to flimsy conspiracy theories, just to muddy the waters. She tells us that it has been alleged that the person who facilitated Shamima Begum’s travel to Syria was “working with Canadian Intelligence as a double agent” and that Abu Hamza, a favourite hate figure of Islamophobes, has been said in some quarters to have been a British Agent. She throws in these hints without committing herself. But they add to the impression she seeks to give that modern Britain is a cauldron of Islamophobia.
As it develops, Warsi’s polemic becomes more and more a stream-of-consciousness meditation:
It’s always fascinated me how, despite the NHS being heavily serviced by Muslim doctors and nurses, Muslims are not generally seen as ‘life-savers’ but rather ‘life-takers’ because of the handful of British Muslims who have committed deadly terrorist attacks.
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Is Warsi’s assertion correct? Are Muslims seen as “life-takers” rather than “life-savers”? Assuming for the sake of argument that she is right, it is easy to see why this might be so. If there were a “handful” of British Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, or atheists who regularly made the headlines for murderous terrorist attacks inspired by their ideology, one might expect that these communities would risk appearing as life-takers rather than life-savers. But no such groups exist. Early in her book Warsi insists that, of course, not all Muslims are jihadis. Exactly so. But all jihadis are Muslims.
A primary purpose of Warsi’s polemic is to promote the APPG (All-Party Parliamentary Group) on Muslims definition of Islamophobia: “rooted in racism… a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. Warsi quotes this definition several times and the word “Islamophobia” recurs numerous times in her book (90, to be precise as opposed to 2 mentions of the Quran and 4 mentions of Mohammed). In 2017 she served on the Parliamentary committee which adopted this definition, and it is clearly dear to her heart.
Nowhere else in the world, except the United Kingdom, would this definition seem in any way plausible. It only seems so in Britain because of the immigration to the country since the Second World War of a large number of very vocal Muslims from, in particular, Pakistan. Taking advantage of British tolerance of racial difference and laws on racial discrimination, this highly assertive minority has succeeded in persuading many liberals in the UK that the rational rejection of the ideology of Islam can be conflated with crude prejudice against brown skin colour. This is not a mistake that could be made in other countries whose racial composition cannot be so easily simplified.
Warsi is thus baffled that a similarly secure definition of “Islamophobia” has never been adopted by the Conservative Party to match the uncontroversial definition of “antisemitism”. She references the British pogrom in York in 1190 and makes a parallel with “pogroms” directed at Muslims following the Southport killings in 2024 (though no one was killed in them). In her peroration she writes: “I want you, the reader, to be as outraged as I am. I want you to demand that Islamophobia is taken as seriously as antisemitism.”
But this parallel is more problematic than Warsi, or her close Jewish friend David Baddiel, admit. Jewishness is a racial characteristic. Hitler did not ask whether a Jew was observant or secular before requiring that he or she be killed. But neither Islam nor “Muslimness”, as Warsi glancingly concedes, is a race. Islam is an ideology held by believers of all races. Moreover, the anti-Jewish marches which take place in London every other weekend are fuelled, in the case of a number of the participants, by the ancient hatred of Jews expressed by Mohammed in the Quran and Hadiths.
For the UK Parliament to accept the APPG on British Muslims definition of Islamophobia would be a disaster for social cohesion. “Sarah”, the victim of a “grooming gang” in Rotherham, has good reasons to fear Islam, but racism is not one of them. Her ordeal was related by Baroness Cox in the one-hour House of Lords debate on “Grooming Gangs” which took place on 14 May 2019. She describes how she was
kidnapped aged 15, imprisoned in a house, forced to learn the Koran [Quran] and beaten when she made mistakes. She was kept as a sex-slave for 12 years and was repeatedly raped by different members of the grooming gang. She had three forced Sharia marriages, eight forced abortions and two live births. Her abusers referred to her as “white trash”. They forced her to wear Islamic dress and permitted her to speak only Urdu and Punjabi.
In this context Warsi’s polemic reads somewhat sourly.
Warsi is backing the wrong horse here. It will not be possible to legislate in the UK to privilege Islam. Indeed, the new Labour Government has already begun to backtrack on its intention to incorporate the definition of Islamophobia as “a type of racism” into law. The government minister Lord Wajid Khan has admitted that the definition is “not in line” with equality laws.
The problem is obvious, though not to Warsi. Scarcely a day goes by without a report of an atrocity against women by the Afghan Taliban, the rape and forced conversion of a Hindu or Christian girl in Pakistan, a lynching for “blasphemy” in Bangladesh, a bloodbath of Christians by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. The Quran is full of hatred for these groups, and Islam has a 1400-year history of violence against them. In Warsi’s universe, as we have seen, these tensions are trivial or non-existent. But we live in the real world where many recent UK immigrants come from these regions.
For this reason alone, it will not be easy for the government to formulate the legal wording by which “Islamophobia” can be criminalised. The task will certainly be beyond Angela Rayner’s conceptual capacities. British Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, and traditionalist Christians will resist any definition which misrepresents the centuries of bloodshed by which Islam has conquered the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, and North Africa. Is it proposed to criminalise Sir Vidia Naipaul and Sir Salman Rushdie as “racists”? These are questions too difficult for Warsi’s one-dimensional polemic, in which the only conceivable reason to fear Islam is racial prejudice or “phobia”. Her book sets up easy questions and comes up with easy answers.
