The rise in Islamophobia has left Bristol Muslim community with ‘low morale’

November's Islamophobia Awareness month comes after a record number of hate crimes against Muslims in the UK. We spoke to Muslims in Bristol who said they feel the morale is low among people in their community and that more work needs to be done to ensure Bristol is a welcoming city for everyone.

Recorded hate crimes towards Muslim communities rose 13 per cent this year across the UK. Tell MAMA, a national project which records and measures anti-Muslim incidents in the United Kingdom, reported an increase in discrimination and abuse directed towards Muslims for displaying Pro-Palestine views.

Sedef Ahmad who supports women across several mosques in Bristol and is part of Bristol’s Interfaith forum said that she has felt the need to focus on more wellbeing sessions this year. “We need to make people stronger emotionally to cope with some of the negativity around. I incorporate a lot of my work as a psychologist in the community.

“The morale is very low with a lot of people in the Muslim community. It’s not just overt, it may mean they don’t get called for a job interview or they may be treated unfairly without realising it," she said.

Advocacy organisation CAGE International released a report in January last year highlighting how people were targeted in their schools, universities and workplaces for supporting Palestine, with 209 out of the 214 cases involving Muslims. The report highlighted that government-led counter-terrorism programme Prevent was being weaponised against Muslims who displayed Pro-Palestine views.

Schoolchildren can be put on the Prevent database if teachers view them as 'being drawn into terroism". The controversial government-led programme was the subject of a United Nations report in August this year which led to calls from the UN and Amnesty International to suspend Prevent as a result of the negative impact it has on Muslim communities.

“I know people who have been really upset over the Prevent strategy because their children have been spoken to after saying something about Palestine at school. All of this has a knock on effect. It’s not always obvious and people don’t always want to talk about it,” added Sedef.

Aumairah Hassan has also come across parents in Bristol whose children have been recorded on the Prevent database for having pro-Palestine views. After the riots, she helped to organise self-defence classes for Muslim women and one of her friends encountered verbal abuse at the time while walking on the Bristol to Bath Railway path with her baby, which she encouraged her to report.

Aumairah who has been actively involved in Pro-Palestine protests in Bristol over the last year has said that she has encountered incidents of ‘Islamaphobic slurs’ and people being called terrorists for attending the marches. For Aumairah, these incidents alongside the summer riots have not occurred in a vacuum but are a direct result of the way the media and politicians have addressed the war in Gaza and the protests against it.

She said: “I think the dehumanisation of Palestinians is very much linked to the dehumanisation of Muslim communities here in the UK. It serves to justify what Israel is doing because they have always said, ‘we are fighting terrorists and we have to do what we are doing to protect ourselves’.

“Unfortunately the ripple effect of the Islamophobia and racism that Palestinians and Muslims experience in the Middle East definitely has an effect on Muslims elsewhere. The media have to be held accountable for their role in Islamophobia in the last year.

“Our government's support for a genocidal regime has provided fuel for Islamophobia. Peaceful protests were labelled hate marches.”

Sedef feels people in Bristol need to unite, not only around Islamophobia but all forms of racism and discrimination, for real progress to be made. For her, the issue is that while a lot of good work is being done in the city, more also needs to be done to bring together people from different backgrounds who are all impacted by wider issues such as the rise in the cost of living.