Voice of British Muslim Women

Nooresahar Ahmad, Hartlepool

For some people, a natural response to the harrowing 9 minute video depicting the murder of Black American George Floyd by white police officers was the question, ‘how could this have happened?’ I worry that we in Britain, rather than looking at our country’s own relationship with race, may choose a more comfortable answer: ‘because it’s America, and America has a problem with race that we in Britain do not have’.

Yet Britain has a record on race so complex, difficult and at times appalling, that a portion of it doesn’t even exist. In 2013, it was discovered that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been unlawfully concealing 1.2m historical files, containing pages on an array of topics including the slave trade, with more than 20,000 files concerning the withdrawal from empire. This was a symptom of a larger problem: a tendency to deal with our history by ignoring it and concealing it.

During the process of the decolonisation of the British Empire, colonial officials had completed “destruction certificates”, in which they declared the disposal of sensitive papers. Beginning in India in 1947, “government officials… incinerated material that would in any way embarrass Her Majesty’s government, her armed forces, or her colonial civil servants”. This was given a new name in Uganda in March 1961 by officials: Operation Legacy. Before long it was being used in neighbouring colonies, where only “British subjects of European descent” were to be involved in the destruction of documents. In what was then Northern Rhodesia, colonial officials were issued with further orders to destroy “all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty’s government”.

That being said, enough information remains on the British Empire and the exploits of the 18th and 19th centuries for us to understand, engage with, and learn from our history. As it stands, however, we in Britain can go through the entire public education system hardly encountering any of it. I’m sure many of us could still recite the names of each of Henry VIII’s wives and the events of the Battle of Hastings in 1066- and yet many of us were never taught about the Scramble for Africa, the Bengal Famine, the Partition of India, or British involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Perhaps this is why a third of people in the UK believe Britain’s colonies were better off for being part of an empire- a higher proportion than in any of the other major colonial powers. Or why the YouGov polling found that most Britons are more likely to say they would like their country to still have an empire than people in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany or Japan.

Perhaps if our present was unblemished, we wouldn’t feel these gaps in our knowledge so keenly. But from MP Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 which incited racial hatred, to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 which resulted in a public inquiry concluding that the Met Police Force was “institutionally racist”, to the deportation of Windrush generation immigrants who had lived here for decades, we have seen time and again that our country has a problem with racism. It should not be controversial to confront this honestly.

In the Holy Qur’an Chapter 13 Verse 12 Allah states, “Surely, Allah changes not the condition of a people until they change that which is in their hearts”. This verse teaches us the important lesson that we cannot expect improvement without critical evaluation and a desire to learn from our mistakes. A true change in our country’s heart will not be brought about by obliterating records and ignoring the issue of race. Rather, initiatives such as Black British History and the ‘Impact of Omission’, who believe that “By educating the youngest generations on topics such as colonialism, we give them a fuller view of British history and the resources to build their own opinions.”, are leading the way in rethinking our curriculum.

Perhaps it is time, then, to embark on creating a new legacy for the future; one that is based on dealing with the truths of our past and present.