Surveillance and Security: How Islamophobia Benefits The State
An interview with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan
“Writing and performing poetry has taught me a lot about the power of language; top-down narratives may be difficult to disrupt, but we do have an opportunity to tell alternative stories.”
People are inclined to avoid difficult topics of conversation because they’re afraid of confronting inconvenient truths. This narrow-minded tendency deprives us of intellectual stimulation and empathy.
To combat the rise of divisive politics and rampant individualism, we need to break down sociocultural silos. According to writer, performer and educator Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, there are several ways of achieving this goal.
Suhaiymah hosts the Breaking Binaries podcast and has contributed to The Guardian, the Independent, gal-dem magazine and Al-Jazeera. She also co-founded The Nejma Collective, an abolitionist volunteer group working in solidarity with imprisoned Muslims.
Her work seeks to challenge dominant narratives about race, gender, religion and violence by offering an alternative view of history and the lived experiences of vulnerable groups. I wanted to learn more about her most recent book, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia.
Tangled in Terror is a political and social critique, which befits the sociopolitical nature of Islamophobia. Is this a book you have wanted to write for a while, or was it inspired by a particular event or experience?
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t really want to write about Islamophobia. Pluto Press asked me to contribute to a series of books that offer a more radical or rigorous analysis of concepts that many people only understand at surface-level. I accepted this opportunity because, in my experience, studies on Islamophobia tend to be really academic — and therefore inaccessible to the majority of us — or focused on myth-busting. It’s actually rather futile and short-sighted to argue that ‘Muslims do actually integrate’ and that ‘Muslims aren’t really misogynistic’. I don’t believe that Muslims should have to justify or prove themselves.
I’m more interested in asking questions like ‘Why does Islamophobia exist? Where did these tropes come from? Who do they benefit?’ We talk about Islamophobia as if it’s an irrational hatred or random prejudice, rather than something structural and sociopolitically constructed. I’m not suggesting that it’s a conspiracy, but there are beneficiaries — just as racism has historically benefited certain groups. That’s what made me want to write this book. I think it deserves to exist.
I suppose that’s the whole point of your book; rather than just explaining what Islamophobia is, you also explore what it does and how it works. It’s important to understand the material, everyday impact.
Yeah, exactly. The practical consequences aren’t emphasised enough, so I wanted to bring them out into the open. The visible aspects of Islamophobia — such as street harassment, hate crimes and sensational newspaper headlines — are just the tip of the iceberg. When I was talking to people and doing research for the book, I realised that the sharp end of violence is perpetrated through the state. People get stopped at the border and their homes are raided by counterterrorism police, all because the law empowers agents of the state to racially profile people and associate them with terrorism — often without any reasonable suspicion.
This kind of top-down, policy-driven Islamophobia is what piqued my interest. I then started to question why it exists. I wanted to prove that it’s not just random racism; if states are allowed to build surveillance apparatuses, they can clamp down on any kind of dissent. The UK is supposedly a democracy that values free speech, but recently we’ve seen people being arrested for protesting after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. I wanted to understand how states benefit from expanding security measures in the name of policing Muslims. This gives them more control over dissent, which is dangerous because democracy only works if people have the right to speak out and protest.
Islamophobia also reveals major contradictions around the profitability of state policing. A lot of money is made by buying and selling arms to support the war on terror, investing in border control and surveillance tools, and making private contracts with prisons and detention centres. There are real material benefits and real material losses.
As you said, this is a structural issue that affects vulnerable groups on an everyday basis. The fact that authority figures have the power to implement prejudiced policies is worrying, because who can we turn to if we can’t speak out against the state?
Precisely! Part of the reason I titled the book Tangled in Terror was to speak to that very issue. In 2008, a man called Rizwaan Sabir was arrested because he downloaded a document, for research purposes, that was deemed dangerous by the University of Nottingham. This is a freely available file that anyone can download from the US government website; you can even buy it from WHSmith. Even so, Rizwaan was detained under counterterrorism laws. The case was eventually dropped, but he now lives with psychosis and extreme paranoia. Imagine your university calling the police on you!
What’s interesting is the tangle you’ve alluded to; if Rizwaan tried to access NHS mental health services, he’d have to explain that his paranoia was caused by the counterterrorist incident. As public servants, the NHS workers would have a statutory requirement to report him to Prevent as a suspicious and potentially dangerous person. So, as you mentioned, vulnerable people have nowhere to go. The state portrays itself as a safeguarder: an authority that secures us. But many of these so-called security policies actually make people like Rizwaan much more vulnerable.
Islamophobia and racism manifest in different ways — some more evident than others. Subtle expressions of prejudice are arguably the most pernicious because they often go unnoticed, except by the people who are targeted. How difficult is it to educate someone about an issue they have never personally experienced?
On the back of the book launch, I’ve run a lot of workshops in community spaces. There’s a moment when the room almost splits and you realise that some people have never experienced Islamophobia, while others perceive it as a normal everyday occurrence. A prime example is the Prevent policy that was introduced in 2015, which legally requires any public servant to look out for signs of radicalisation among the people in their care, who might be students or patients. This leads to disproportionate reporting of particular groups — especially children under 16, who now experience school as a place of punishment and surveillance, rather than a place of education.
What’s fascinating is that many Muslims — whether or not they know the ins and outs of the law — have internalised the knowledge that they are being watched. Signs of radicalisation can be as ambiguous as a change in dress code; people are taught to regard these subtle expressions as suspicious because they’re coming from a particular group. So, people police themselves by making tiny decisions throughout the day. For example, I wear pastel-coloured headscarves because I don’t want to be perceived as daunting. Some students are self-conscious about taking a course on counterterrorism or going to the prayer room together.
The public don’t really understand how sinister and pernicious the Prevent policy is. On the surface, preventing future violence sounds reasonable. But this is not a neutral policy, and I hope that my book will raise awareness of that fact. The very idea of trying to pre-empt violence or creating policy prior to evidence is unscientific and problematic. It’s a massive issue that we should all be aware of, because these apparatuses make it possible for everybody to be under surveillance.
A few years ago, the British government and local councils advised educators not to teach anti-capitalist views that could lead to radicalisation. These ideological decisions go beyond what is traditionally considered to be an indication of future violence or extremism; they now target anything that contradicts the state’s agenda. We should care about this, not only because it threatens minority groups, but also because it could affect all of us.
It’s especially disturbing because so many right-wing and far-right parties are coming into power across Europe. How do you reach someone who is intentionally ignorant and unwilling to accept an alternative perspective?
To be quite honest, I see that as other people’s work. Tangled in Terror is for readers who are willing to learn and think critically. Muslims who have experienced Islamophobia first-hand don’t necessarily have a rigorous analytical framework to fall back on. One of my motives for writing this book was to equip people with some basic tools and strategies to combat Islamophobia.
Reaching people who have completely internalised Islamophobia and aren’t conscious of their prejudices is an entirely different challenge. You have to raise awareness of the issue first in order to make an impression. According to my view of the world, we all have different roles to play. There are people working hard to educate others, but I’m interested in creating frameworks for those of us who are already willing to have constructive discussions.
I completely agree that it’s not your responsibility to defend Muslims or change the minds of people who refuse to accept another perspective. It’s admirable that you’re trying to raise awareness by creating space for open discussions and revealing the wider significance of Islamophobia. Do you think that people can unlearn what they have been conditioned to believe?
I believe that people can change their minds. We need to create a more forgiving society in which it’s acceptable for people to alter their opinions, because judging them is really antithetical to growth. I’m committed to education and sharing ideas; if you grant people a proper understanding of the conditions and context in which they live, they are more likely to understand things that would otherwise be blurred or invisible.
To give a concrete example of what I mean, let’s take the word ‘terrorism’. This term obscures the fact that violence perpetrated by Muslim people might have political, social or economic causes; it’s not always motivated by cultural or religious ideologies. It’s convenient to use a word like ‘terrorism’ to describe this type of violence because it absolves the state of any responsibility. However, a mass shooting by a white man in the US is usually understood as an individual act, motivated by personal issues, political views or social circumstances. If you ask people to consider the root causes, they are capable of understanding violence in different contexts. If we help people realise that the thoughts they have might not be their own, I think it’s possible for them to unlearn things.
While we’re on the topic of education, what does ‘decolonising the curriculum’ mean to you, as a speaker and educator? Why is this important, especially at a time when certain books are being banned in schools?
That’s an interesting question. I think ‘decolonising’ has become a bit of a buzzword; it feels like everyone’s decolonising everything these days. But we have to be careful that it’s not purely theoretical. At the moment, institutions tend to absorb and co-opt this language without changing really simple things. For instance, if your cleaning staff are mainly immigrants, this is a colonial relationship in terms of material labour.
Decolonisation discussions in some universities emphasise that it’s not just about the curriculum. Investing in oil and gas companies makes a university complicit in climate change catastrophes, which disproportionately affect the Global South. There are real colonial relationships still at play that are often hidden by conversations focused solely on the curriculum.
However, I do think decolonisation raises questions about the education system. Our educational history is often Eurocentric, so we’re familiar with tropes and narratives from a one-sided perspective. This is likely to inculcate racist and imperialist notions of hierarchy, and it’s not the most intellectually rigorous way to develop a curriculum. But it’s exciting to see things changing; a few English teachers have reached out to me about using my poetry in their lessons. It’s important to establish different avenues through which people can engage with ideas and questions. Yes, it’s about the books on our curriculum, but it’s also about what the classroom looks like and the teaching methods.
The workshops I facilitate are designed to redistribute power in the classroom by changing the educator-learner dynamic. Essentially, I’m just another participant with a few more resources to hand that I can share with others. The questions raised by attempting to decolonise education are really important because they affect how people perceive themselves. The ability to make different futures possible does something really powerful for all of us. So, in general, I think decolonisation efforts are fantastic, but we have to be really critical about our approaches.
It reminds me of quotas and positive discrimination. So many companies pay lip service to diversity and inclusion by trying to achieve a particular percentage of women and minority groups in their workforce. But, too often, it’s just a box-ticking exercise. If you don’t question why you’re doing it, then it’s pointless.
I think that ‘Why?’ always needs to be the number one question. Unfortunately, in today’s capitalist societies, the motive is usually profit. After the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020, a lot of companies posted statements of support, purely because they thought it was the morally correct thing to do and would appeal to their customers. It was less a case of being genuinely concerned about their labour practices and association with racial violence. There’s often a big contradiction at the heart of anti-racism struggles.
I’m keen to get your take on what’s happening in Iran at the moment. As we’ve seen on the news, women are cutting their hair and burning their hijabs in protest against the death of an Iranian woman while in police custody. These events have sparked international debates about female bodily autonomy and religious freedom. Have you witnessed a rise in Islamophobia as a result? Do you think the media coverage is effectively capturing the nuances in how different women experience the veil?
My interpretation of what’s happening in Iran — similar to lots of women on the ground — is that the state should not have any involvement in what women wear. That’s the basic crux of it. What’s frustrating in the way that Islamophobia plays out on an international scale is that the level of outrage and solidarity being extended to women in Iran is never shown when it’s the other way around. Several European countries have banned hijabs, burqas and burkinis; in Switzerland, less than 0.5% of women wear a niqāb, and yet a niqāb ban was voted in on International Women’s Day 2021. There is rarely an outcry when Western countries introduce state-sanctioned rules that tell women what to wear. I think there’s a real contradiction within mainstream feminist discourses that exposes an unfortunate complicity in Islamophobia.
Realistically, there is still a pervasive colonial attitude that only the uncovering of a body is liberatory; if a woman chooses to wear more clothes, this is suddenly a problem. It’s hypocritical because the West is not actually invested in women’s bodily autonomy, but rather in a specific and coercive form of what we perceive as autonomous. The US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (the Constitutional right to abortion) is a stark reminder that the state should not have a say in what women do with their bodies. There are exciting connections to be made here; whether you’re in Iran, France or the US, states across the world assume that they have the power to enact violence on women’s bodies through policing and the law.
Unfortunately, those connections aren’t being made, which is incredibly frustrating. Women in Iran have every right to protest and make public statements, and it’s devastating that this can mutate into Islamophobia in the West. There is a conflation between what states decree and ideological, religious or individual choices. For Muslim women in the West to face a backlash because of protests in Iran feels like we are completely missing the point. Once again, the real culprits are absolved of any blame.
That was beautifully articulated, thank you. In many Western countries, certain populations are subject to intrusive forms of social control, often sanctioned by the state in the name of national security. What do governments and institutions seek to gain by constructing an ‘other’ that poses a threat to social order?
In a nutshell, it’s a diversion or distraction tactic. Dividing the population in order to control them has been a colonial tool for over 300 years. At the moment, we’re experiencing a cost-of-living crisis that has been aggravated by government decisions — such as allowing corporations to make disproportionate levels of profit. Instead of recognising that this is a shared condition caused by state capitalism, people are convinced that immigrants are the biggest issue in this country. They think that the cost of living has risen because we’re paying benefits to outsiders.
There’s nothing clever about this logic. States just want to avoid being held accountable for not acting in the public interest. As I said earlier, they’ve created an ‘other’ to justify constructing an apparatus of surveillance and punitive policing; whether they’re stripping citizenship or deporting people, everything is done in the name of national security. Now, modern states can actually weaponise the same tools against anyone and everyone — although, of course, this disproportionately affects people of colour.
It also exposes contradictions in the language of the state. The notion of British values is propagated through the law; since 2015, schools have been required to teach pupils about things like freedom of speech, tolerance and the rule of law as British values. And yet the state contravenes all of these things whenever it seeks to benefit from the situation. As a consequence, the state disappears from the centre of our analysis and we just end up blaming one another. Tabloids are also very good at amplifying the idea that vulnerable people are the biggest threat to society.
We need to reflect on how we are being so cleverly diverted from where our attention should be focused. My book emphasises the importance of identifying the root causes of Islamophobia so that people realise their neighbour isn’t their enemy; they actually have a shared condition. If people can make those connections, they’ll see the bigger picture.
Discrimination often comes down to an imbalance of power — whether it’s based on race, gender, religion, class, etc. What are the best ways for individuals or groups to disrupt power relations? How do these methods differ around the world?
That’s a big question, but a really important one. I’m convinced that power is always up for grabs; we can always claim it because it’s not the monopoly of one person. Each of us has access to the power of the words we use and the stories we tell. What would happen if people stopped using the language of terrorism when a Muslim commits an act of violence, and instead framed it as ‘a Muslim person who was violent’? Suddenly, it becomes an individual act with background context. What if we all stopped referring to counterterrorism, deportation and state violence as security measures, and instead called them what they really are?
We should focus our attempts to reclaim or disrupt power on deconstructing colonial narratives because material reality is upheld by language. It really does matter what we do and what we say. Writing and performing poetry has taught me a lot about the power of language; top-down narratives may be difficult to disrupt, but we do have an opportunity to tell alternative stories.
Direct action is also really important — whether it’s reaching a new consensus or refusing to consent to racist policies. If public servants came together and said, ‘No, we refuse to implement Prevent’, their defiance would shift the balance of power. If every single person refuses to obey that law, what can the state do? Withdrawing consent on a mass scale is the basis of industrial action and strikes, and history is full of exciting provocations. One of the best examples is the protest against the Iraq War in the early 2000s: members of the public said, ‘Our state may be doing this but, in the capacity we have, we do not accept it’. Although the war did actually happen, I still think this is a powerful example of an event that wasn’t sanctioned by the people.
There are several ways to disrupt the power dynamic and they vary across the world. There are so many imaginative and creative approaches at the grassroots level, so find out what’s already happening in your local area and your workplace. We are all likely to be involved in different dynamics of racial hierarchy, so think about how you can disrupt them in your day-to-day interactions with colleagues, friends and peers. I think we have a particular moral responsibility in the UK — and in the West more broadly — because our states are deeply complicit in imperialism, which is one of the biggest sources of Islamophobia and racism.
It seems as though there’s a lot of potential, which is really positive! You went viral in 2017 as a runner-up in the National Roundhouse Poetry Slam with ‘This is Not a Humanising Poem’, which features in Postcolonial Banter. Given that your poetry has attracted over 2 million views online, how useful is the internet as a platform to share your creative and critical work?
Until the Roundhouse uploaded my slam video, I had never considered the internet as that kind of platform. The ideas in ‘This is Not a Humanising Poem’ formed part of my master’s dissertation; I remember thinking that only a few people would read it, whereas 2 million people around the world can engage with this poem online. I’ve since been invited to perform it internationally. So, the internet does offer radical cross-border opportunities, in the sense that you can reach new audiences and raise consciousness on a scale previously unimaginable.
But, at the same time, there are limits to the potential of the internet. Millions of people engaging momentarily with my poem is both fantastic and superficial. The real work we need to do is local, deep and slow. As you asked earlier, how can we change people’s minds? It’s not a one-poem solution. I wish it was.
Some people might read the whole of my book, Tangled in Terror, but get a stronger message from one of my poems. It’s fascinating that ideas can be shared in different ways. Storytelling is often more compelling than rigorous analysis, but I think they should complement one another.
Suhaiymah’s other books can also be found on Perlego:
