If you're Muslim in a UK airport, expect the worst from the police

Last week, footage from Manchester Airport went viral showing 19-year-old Muhammed Fahir being brutally attacked by a police officer.

Even though he was already handcuffed, he was kicked in the head by the armed officer and his skull was stamped on. It has since emerged that he has developed a cyst on the brain and according to his solicitor, he has been left understandably traumatised by the incident.

In our divided and fractious society, it’s little wonder that the violent assault of a young Muslim man by a white police officer has caused widespread protests across Manchester and renewed calls to defund, or at least drastically reform policing in this country.

British policing has a long, fraught history of hostility and violence towards minority communities in the UK, particularly Black Britons and disproportionately young black men. A survey last year found that black people are seven times more likely to die after police restraint than white people.

From Stephen Lawrence to Mark Duggan, our national history is stained with the stories of black men and women being brutalised or systemically failed by the police. You only need to look at stop-and-search figures to see this racist double standard at play. In 2023, there were 92 stop and searches for every 1,000 black people compared to just 5.9 for every 1,000 white people.

Of course, the police also have a well-documented track record of abuse and disproportionate force against non-black people of colour, especially Muslims who are hyper-criminalised at the hands of the state and its various arms of enforcement.

But at a time like this, those of us who are non-black Muslims mustn’t fall into the trap of exceptionalising our treatment at the hands of a police force that has proven to have a systemic racism problem across the board — even if we are understandably angry at the footage that emerged from Manchester Airport.

Akhmad Yakoob, the solicitor employed by Muhammed Fahir’s family, has come under criticism in recent days for claiming that the violence towards Fahir is entirely unprecedented and has never before been seen in British history. Statements like this, and pitting ourselves against other alienated communities don’t do us any favours when our struggle is the same.

Horrific and violent though it is, it’s in the reaction rather than the incident itself at Manchester Airport that the true state of racism and Islamophobia in Britain is laid bare.

As soon as the initial footage went viral, social media was flooded with rightwing support of the police and a cesspit of Islamophobia opened up.

Anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK: Greater than Manchester

Comments under the videos shared sentiments like “this is how all Muslims should be treated” and that “the officer wasn’t harsh enough”.

Newly-elected Reform MP, Lee Anderson, commended the police officer for stamping on 19-year-old Fahir’s head and called the men “animals” who “need locking up”.

From politicians to media pundits to trolls on X, there was an immediate blanket assumption that the young man in question must have done something to have warranted this treatment from the police.

Not only does this embed the problematic sentiment that the police force is right by default — despite history telling us otherwise — but it also reveals the troubling public appetite for assigning blame to black and brown victims of police brutality.

There is a prevailing presumption that has tainted how much of the public has reacted to this incident from the beginning and that’s the idea that young brown men, especially Muslims, must be engaged in some criminality and that they therefore deserve a level of brutality from the state that could see them seriously injured or even killed.

Incidentally, further footage has been released in the last few hours which shows Muhammed Fahir and another man punching police officers in the face before then being restrained on the floor and kicked in the head.

Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has called for calm and claimed that “there is more to” what the initial viral video showed. Whilst this adds some context to the subsequent incident, it’s worth interrogating if we would be using the same language of blame and justification if this was a white person.

If the bloodstained history of policing in the UK has taught us anything, it’s likely a white perpetrator of an even more serious crime would never have had his head stamped on and kicked in the first place.

The significance of the airport as a setting for this affair cannot be overlooked. Since the 'War on Terror', airports have become sites of violence for British Muslims where systemic Islamophobia and counter-terror machinery are on full display.

From disproportionate policing to microaggressions, undue interrogation and default suspicion, airports are routinely places where Muslims feel the full brunt of the contempt that the state and its arms of enforcement hold towards us — and in these seemingly innocuous spaces that others associate with duty-free and holiday excitement, it renders us unsafe.

When we look at what unfolded in Manchester Airport last week, we must consider the implications of Muhammed Fahir and his family being Muslim in a space as politicised as an airport.

Punching a police officer in the face might be unwise and illegal, but doing so as a Muslim in an airport is an invitation for a deeply racist police force to enact the aims of a deeply racist state — and it's the conditions that have made that a reality that needs interrogating rather than unpicking the specifics of who did what in leaked footage.

The Manchester Airport attack raises questions about our beliefs regarding police force and justice. Do we believe in a police force that distributes justice through brute force, or do we believe in a more equitable vision of justice?

Nadeine Asbali is a freelance writer and secondary school teacher based in London. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain

Follow her on X: @nadeinewrites

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.