Drum: FAITH
81
W
hen I asked a friend of mine
what made him revert to Islam
at the age of 28 he told me it
was ‘the blackness of Islam’. Growing up
as a British ‘Bombay mix’ (my father is a
Gujarati Indian and my mother a Punjabi
Pakistani), the relationship between my
ethnicities and my faith was a consistent
feature of my adolescence. This said, I
have never thought of Islam as a colour.
To me it has remained the source of
spiritual guidance and faith. In retrospect,
its description as a ‘black’ faith makes
sense to me on so many levels.
Asked to make a contribution to DRUM on the topic
of Islamophobia my first hurdle was to try and grasp
what I understood by the term itself. I came to the
realisation that Islamophobia is far more embedded
within British institutions than it first appears. It is
also far less aggressive than current literature would
have it. Muslims have not experienced nearly the
same level of physical and verbal assaults that were
common for black people (of all races) in the 70s
and 80s. In contrast, today the personal security of
Muslims remains, for the most part, intact. Rather,
it is in the constructed ignorance (a term coined by
Madeleine Bunting of the Guardian) with which
Islam is understood that Islamophobia is most
insidious. Islam has been constructed as bad, and
there remains a great deal of reluctance for this
ignorance to be dispelled.
Originating from the Arab region of the world, the
Islamic faith has retained its connection to the
ethnicity of its followers and its proponents. Rather
than lightening the skins of its prophets, Islam »
Islamophobia
between faith, politics and human rights.