Muslims Don’t Matter is a refrain that is repeated throughout Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s new book of the same name. It is impossible to finish the short but punchy polemic without feeling a bubbling sense of injustice for the manifold ways Muslims are maligned, overlooked and criminalised in Britain.
Yet, I was left wondering how radical a book by a former member of a party, like the Conservatives, can ever really be and whether its arguments do more harm than good.
In the book published by Bridge Street, the former Conservative minister, the first Muslim woman in cabinet and life peer — who formally resigned from the party in September in protest against the increasingly far-right politics that has come to define the Tories of late — details exactly how Muslims “don’t matter” to the system, the state, the media and the wider British public.
From support for Palestine to voting for independent electoral candidates, the Prevent policy to the Trojan Horse scandal, the sacrifices of Muslims during Covid to the travesty of Shamima Begum being made stateless, Warsi outlines how every facet of our lives as British Muslims is subject to attack and ridicule, suspicion and double-standards.
On the surface, the book seems unapologetic and direct. She opens with the line “So I’m done with apologising”, which sets up a promising argument about refusing to play the role of the good, palatable Muslim any longer.
In some ways, the book does stay true to this defiant opening. Warsi draws on her own experiences in government and exposes how the inner workings of the Conservative Party have so often actively discriminated against Muslims, especially in ways the average member of the public might be unaware of.
She details the microaggressions and instances of barefaced Islamophobia she has faced in public life, like her constituents referring to the local corner shop as “the Paki shop” in her presence, her advisers being told to “keep an eye” on her despite her senior role as party chairman, or being told to keep complaints of Islamophobia quiet so as not to upset colleagues with ties to known anti-Muslim organisations like the Policy Exchange think tank.
And that’s before you get onto the “thousands of abusive emails, letters and messages” that she has come to “accept as part of her daily inbox”.
It is clear that in many ways this book is a work of personal catharsis for Warsi who has been an outspoken critic of her own party’s hypocrisies for decades and has, finally, had enough.
Yet, at times, I felt frustrated by this book. For me, it didn’t quite go far enough and I couldn’t help but suspect that Warsi’s time within the establishment had rubbed off on her in more ways than she perhaps acknowledges.
For all the claims of refusing to apologise or justify ourselves as Muslims, I found that various segments did the exact opposite and upheld a "good" Muslim vs "bad" Muslim dichotomy that ultimately only ends up cementing the discrimination we face.
Take the issue of Muslims serving in the armed forces — something Warsi’s family has a long history of and from which she derives a lot of pride. In a chapter about Muslims being forced into considering a “plan B” which sees us leaving Britain, the country we call home, due to unbearable hostilities towards us, Warsi writes: “I refuse to accept that the country both my paternal and maternal grandfathers fought for during the Second World War in Aden and in Burma, a country for whom my great uncle was captured as a prisoner of war in Singapore, a country that one of my children serves in uniform, a country for which my family have a long and proud tradition of protecting is no longer safe for us.”
Understandably, one would feel proud of their personal family history, but to include such a statement in a book purporting to criticise the ways Muslims have to justify our own humanity to be deemed worthy to remain in Britain seems confusing at best and downright damaging at worst.
Dig into this quote and really what we see is the very same argument that is weaponised against us time and time again. What have we done to deserve to be here? How have we earned our Britishness? And why don’t non-Muslim, white Britons ever have to validate their existence in the same way?
To tie her incredulity at having to consider leaving Britain to the fact her family members have “protected” the nation simply scores her own goal to the very cause the book claims to champion, throwing under the bus the thousands of Muslims whose descendants and children aren’t decorated war heroes serving King and Country.
The logical conclusion to this flawed argument is that if we or our relatives haven’t laid our lives on the line for the nation, then we don’t deserve to be here — or at least not as much as those “good” Muslims who have made such sacrifices.
We see this disappointingly reductive premise crop up elsewhere in the book too. In the final pages, Warsi writes: “I have great faith in my country and its people. Once the poisoned tap of culture wars is turned off, once those in leadership stop feeding hate, ordinary people will embrace British Muslims as many have embraced them now. Whether it’s our Bake Off queen Nadiya Hussain, World Cup-winning cricketer Moeen Ali, the Egyptian king in Liverpool Mo Salah, multiple gold medal-winning Olympian Sir Mo Farah, Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed the gastro doctor and MasterChef winner, the new David Attenborough and rhythm personified Hamza Yassin, winner of Strictly Come Dancing, or Asmaa Al-Allak, the surgeon and seamstress extraordinaire who won The Great British Sewing Bee, many Muslims are our national heroes. As my friend the former Conservative MP for High Wycombe, Steve Baker said, ‘They deserve better than to be the object of this clear and intolerable bigotry.’”
This passage, again, filled me with the same disappointment as before. Yes, we all get a little excited at Muslim representation in our sports contests and TV shows but what are we saying when we point to exceptional examples to justify our humanity? That we are only worthy of being humanised if we win gold medals or baking competitions? That our existence in this nation should be predicated on becoming a familiar, non-threatening face on daytime television? If this is the best message we can rally around in the fight against Islamophobia, then I can’t help but feel like this book drags us backwards in our progress entirely.
Instead, I’m reminded of Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan’s poem titled This Is Not A Humanising Poem where she implores the reader to accept Muslims when we are “poor”, “lazy”, “depressed” and “unemployed” when we aren’t baking showstopping cakes or offering free taxi rides after terror attacks to prove we’re one of the good guys.
In other words, to suggest that our humanity is linked to what we offer the country simply reinforces the idea that we don’t belong here in the first place — and this is a fundamental principle in the battle against Islamophobia that Warsi’s book seems to bypass entirely, choosing instead to point to examples of Muslim excellence and simply hope that Islamophobia will somehow be cured by the nation’s love for Mo Salah and Nadiya Hussain.
Ultimately, Muslims Don’t Matter didn’t feel like it was written for people like me — more for non-Muslims entirely new to the topic and looking for a brief introduction to Islamophobia in Britain.
In fact, for those of us who experience its realities every day, the book simply proves that radical anti-racism work will rarely be done by those who, up until a matter of months ago, served the very institutions that manufacture our oppression.
Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London.
Follow her on X: @najourno