My week living as a Muslim woman
Katie Freeman’s eyes were opened when she filmed a new documentary in the same week as the Manchester bombing. Victoria Lambert reports
Despite knowing no British Muslims at all, Katie Freeman admits she used to have some stereotypical assumptions: that they ate nothing but Asian food, that women were treated as second-class citizens, forced to wear the hijab. In fact, she would have stated that immigration from Islamic countries such as Pakistan was putting too great a strain on the NHS and “pushing out” the traditional British way of life.
“You could say I followed the herd,” Katie, 43, says today, as she shares tea and cake in the dining room of her new friend Saima Alvi, a 49-year-old religious affairs teacher from Altrincham, Greater Manchester. “I’d just never engaged with anyone Muslim before.”
Which is not surprising. Katie, a healthcare assistant in the NHS, lives with her husband Nathanial, 44, an HGV driver, and their two children, Ryan, 20, and Cameron, 15, in Winsford, Cheshire – a small town just half an hour away from the Alvis, but whose population is one of the whitest in Britain.
“I’ve never been racist,” she points out. “I believe that people should live their lives, be happy, but I don’t think they should put pressure on others.”
However, no one could accuse Katie of having a closed mind. Last April, she was offered the chance to take part in an immersive Channel 4 documentary called My Week as a
Muslim and leapt at the chance to leave her comfort zone.
The documentary, produced by Fozia Khan, who also made Extremely
British Muslims for the channel, aimed to introduce Katie to the British Muslim way of life from the inside, in order to see if there really is more in common than divides us.
“People in the Muslim community understand there is a need to open up,” Khan tells me. “I’m a Pakistani Muslim and my husband is white Yorkshire and the first time our families met was the first time I realised, ‘Oh, people think we are different.’ Yet when they talked what everyone was saying was, ‘Oh, you are just like us.’ Disagreements were done in a joyful way.”
For My Week as a Muslim, Khan found a host family – Saima, her husband Azhar, 52, an environmental scientist, and their children Nabeeha, a 22-year-old trainee accountant, Rumaysa, 20, a second-year medical student, Maymuna, 17, Nusayba, 13, and Muddathir, 11 – who were prepared to welcome Katie into their home and answer all her questions in an attempt to demystify their lives. But none of them could have known how the week would unfold.
It started well, even though Katie now admits she felt “terrified” at what lay ahead: “You wouldn’t even think this was England, at the minute,” she says as she is driven through the heart of Manchester’s Muslim community.
She had wanted to bring a gift but couldn’t think what to take. “I knew I couldn’t fetch a bottle of wine.” But Saima opened her front door “and she had a big smile on her face; she put me at my ease straight away”.
Dinner time served up her first eye-opener. “Saima told me they had things like shepherd’s pie – ‘like you do’. I felt so stupid.” Her next taste of
‘You could say I followed the herd. I’d just never engaged with anyone Muslim before’
Muslim life came at 4am when Katie was woken to share the family’s first prayers of the day. “I found that a bit strange. How do you get up for work in the morning afterwards?”
Later that day, the pair began preparing for Katie’s transformation to go undercover as a British Muslim of Pakistan origin. The production team fitted her with brown contact lenses, a prosthetic Asian-looking nose and complexion-darkening make-up. Saima schooled her in a few words of Arabic and they chose a hijab together.
But at 10pm on Monday May 22, news broke of the devastating terrorist attack on Manchester Arena, just a few miles away. Both women knew families who were at the Ariana Grande concert, which was targeted by a suicide bomber, who murdered 22 innocent people.
“It’s senseless, it’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it makes me sick to the stomach,” says Saima, “and then for us as Muslims, we just pray, we hope, that it’s not a nutter or a loser so-called-muslim.”
It could have been a breaking point for the experiment: “It’s this community that has bred this terrorist,” Katie tells Saima, in one of the tensest moments of the show. “It’s very humiliating that I am pigeonholed, or put in the same box as a terrorist,” her host tells the camera, later.
United in shock, neither were sure at first whether it was appropriate to go on with the project. Katie – “selfishly”, she admits – worried she could be a target of hate when she was dressed in the hijab. “I told Katie that is what I face every day,” says Saima. “This is me for life.”
It seemed more important than ever to prove that the ordinary Muslim community had nothing to hide. After much consultation, Katie agreed to be transformed the next day and meet some of Saima’s friends and family, who were volunteering refreshments to the emergency services. Katie reveals she felt selfconscious in her hijab. “I don’t wear dresses, so I was conscious of tripping over. But it was feminine, it felt nice, more ladylike. I had presumed women were made to wear it, but Saima didn’t start wearing the hijab until she was 18, and no one could make Saima do anything she didn’t want to!”
Saima agrees: “I’m one of five girls and no man could boss us around. It’s a misconception that our religion subjugates us.” She adds, gesturing at her hijab: “This is more of a uniform than anything.”
But not all their experiences were so innocent, and perhaps the point at which the social experiment gains real traction is when Katie decides to wear her hijab home in Winsford. Walking through town, she passes one of her favourite pubs only to be catcalled and racially abused by a group of British white drinkers: “F------ Muslims, in this town?”
It makes for uncomfortable viewing – “It makes me ashamed to live here,” says Katie – and prompts another white woman to come up and tearfully apologise to her for the harassment. The worst and best of British in one snapshot.
Katie says: “I was raging and fuming inside. But I also felt vulnerable. What harm was I doing?”
Back at Katie’s own home, there was another shock. Her daughter Cameron received a text from a friend, the child of a neighbour who must have seen Katie enter her house. It read: “My dad says we don’t want them” – meaning women in a hijab – “round here.”
“Maybe he’ll have a look at himself after seeing this,” says Katie.
Not every aspect of Islam won Katie over. Saima took her to sit in at a matchmaker’s where a young Muslim couple were discussing what they were looking for in a partner. Says Katie, “I thought it was a joke. I couldn’t believe it was real.”
Both were not without a few worries before the show started. Katie says: “I had concerns about how I would be framed. I’m not racist. Although looking back I am surprised at some of my early opinions.”
“People were negative about the idea,” adds Saima. “But there are lots of people out there who just haven’t had the chance to engage with Muslims.”
Saima’s determination to be generous with her world was one of the things that Katie cherished most from the experience. The other was Saima’s lack of judgment: “She would say, don’t think I will be offended, just ask me and I will tell you.”
Katie acknowledges she used to think of British Muslims as “other”, and of women like Saima as “coming into this country, trying to change the way we live”. Now she says, “Saima was born here like me. I get it.”
Saima looks at her with real warmth. “What I have learnt is that there are genuinely nice people who are unfortunately misled about Islam.”
Since the film was made, the pair have kept in touch. Saima says: “We did click straight away. Our friendship has gone beyond this.”
Both feel it is crucial to promote what they have learned – that respect must cut both ways. “And not to judge a book by its cover,” says Katie, “to get to know people and make your own judgments.”
‘I’m one of five girls and no man could boss us around. It’s a misconception that our religion subjugates us’