SARA KHAN, THE MUSLIM CALLING OUT
EXTREMISM
RARELY DOES a day go by without Muslim anti-extremism campaigner Sara Khan being on the receiving end of abuse and death threats.
Her critics — from within Islam, and outside — label her everything from a government stooge to an Islamophobe to an apostate, or demand that she “get out of our country”.
The Bradford-born campaigner mostly takes it on the chin, aware she is everything male Muslim extremists “don’t believe a Muslim woman should be”, not least that she is keen to build bridges with Jews.
But it is the criticism from the far-left — including “white lefty feminists” — that bothers her most.
“You know what you’re going to get on the far-right,” she says. “What I find really distasteful about the far-left is how they claim to be the ones who champion equality and speak out against Islamophobia but then they go around attacking Muslims who they think don’t represent authentic Muslims. It’s so hypocritical.”
As a Muslim who does not wear a headscarf — although she did wear the veil as a teenager, shocking her Pakistan-born parents — Ms Khan suggests that the left doesn’t think she represents what a Muslim should be.
“They think a conservative Muslim is the most authentic Muslim and anyone who doesn’t fit that circle is not a proper Muslim.”
Ms Khan is co-founder of Inspire, which campaigns to promote human rights, oppose Islamist extremism and empower Muslim women, and has sat on a number of government taskforces on radicalisation.
She works in schools and with women across the country; occasionally she is called in by headteachers worried about their pupils, where her approach is to challenge conspiracy theories and “rip out from underneath the ideological underpinnings of the views”.
Yet in recent years she has become a target for hard-left activists given her willingness to speak out against groups including the National Union of Students and Stand up to Racism for forming “an unholy alliance with far-right Islamists” and challenging the prevalence of political correctness around discussing Muslims. Many of the groups she is critical of have also been challenged over their stance on antisemitism.
“Anti-racist groups genuinely don’t understand Islamist extremism, and that these groups stand on the far-right spectrum,” she says. “They refuse to challenge it because they misguidedly think we have to defend them at all costs, because they think all Muslims are the same.”
If human rights and anti-racist campaigners really grasped what extremists say about women, gay people, minorities and Jewish people, “they would be at the forefront of the campaign against them”.
Following the general election, she is very worried about the Labour Party leadership’s perspective.
“There’s a critical battle taking place between Muslims in this country who subscribe to very humanistic interpretations of the Koran, who advocate human rights and equality and oppose homophobia and antisemitism, and Islamist extremists who promote vile views,” she says.
“I don’t think the leadership, including Jeremy Corbyn, understands that.”
In Ms Khan’s view, this failure to distinguish between Muslims hinders progressive voices, and actually promotes a kind of anti-Muslim hatred, because it assumes all British Muslims are responsible for each other’s behaviour.
Rather than denying that the UK faces a security threat from some Muslims — “you can’t gloss over that three quarters of the terror attacks we’ve had in the last few months have come from Islamist extremists” — she says the media needs to stop treating Muslims as a homogenous community and, at the same time, that Muslims should not see hostile coverage as a personal attack.
“Other Muslims get very defensive but it’s like [the extremists] don’t represent us, we have to speak out against them,” she says.
“I don’t feel
Muslim girls attend a vigil after the Finsbury Park attack last month
There is a critical battle taking place between Muslims in this country’